tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Aug 19 18:30:36 1998
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Re: the nature of pIqaD
mujang HomDoq:
>> ...Something that is
>> able to do that is likely to be phonetic in nature, or at least partly
>> phonetic.
>>
>you mean phone_m_ic, I assume
No, I do mean phonetic. I'm talking about a system for representing
spoken sounds with distinct symbols. The term "phonemic" implies to
me an alphabet like the romanized transcription system we use now in
writing Klingon, where each fundamental sound or phoneme has its own
symbolic representation. A syllabic writing system would still be a
phonetic system, wouldn't it?
>> ...with the word "spelled" implying an alphabet.
>>
>jIQoch... assume there was some weird chinese ,dialect', in which the words
>for "one" and for "two" are pronounced identically. The speakers of this
>dialect have to remember which character to use for which word, i.e.
>"which word is spelled which way" if you use the term "spelled" loosely
>enough; certainly you could use the word "spelled" for an ,alphabet'
>like japanese Hiragana or Katakanna?
I was under the impression that kana indicates pronunciation, and I
certainly think it counts as an alphabet which one uses in order to
spell words (especially foreign ones). Possibly my use of the word
"alphabet" *is* a bit loose, as I consider syllabaries to be a kind
of alphabet.
So I still think that the sketchy description of pIqaD that appears
in TKD is more consistent with a way to describe pronunciation than
a pictoral or ideographic system. There are a great many ways that
pronunciation can be described, however, and we will probably never
get any better clues than we already have.
-- ghunchu'wI'