tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jun 24 14:24:44 1998
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Re: Klingon monocase
- From: Robyn Stewart <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Klingon monocase
- Date: Wed, 24 Jun 1998 11:15:52 -0700 (PDT)
---Anthony Appleyard wrote:
> Writing Klingon (in the Roman alphabet) with all the letters in
the same
> case (e.g. **{dujhomvad} for {DujHomvaD}) is a bad breach of style but
> comprehensible - except for the distinction q/Q.
pj tlhngn Hl mj yjlH p'w', 'ch chq Qthq'
Can you read that? I bet some people can.
Spelling and grammar and context provide a sort of mental checksum so
that even with missing information the message can be decoded. Often
a skilled speaker can understand incorrect Klingon, but it may be very
difficult. (Which is what the Klingon sentence above says, lacking
vowels).
> What is people's experience
> of having to transmit Klingon text in a medium such > as Morse Code
or some
> telex codes that have only one case of letters?
The closest thing to this I know of is in Klingon licence plate
slogans, which must be all caps, with no apostrophe. There is at
least one QAPLA plate out there, and I'm sure many people on this list
would recognize SUVWI or TLHNGN faster than WEXLR8 or 10SNE1.
Information is lost in many communications media, but people cope.
> What also if the medium used (e.g. Morse as far as > I know) has no
code for
> apostrophe? When I have seen Klingon words > used as PC filenames
(where
> Messy-DOS won't allow apostrophes, although it will > allow many
other sorts of
> veQ such as curly brackets), any apostrophes are > omitted; but that
can't be
> done easily with continuous text.
We get KLBC contributions sometimes with apostrophes missing or
altered by some formatting
problem, and as long as there is enough context and the grammar isn't
too scary, I can get through it. ghinchu'wI' is very good at reading
through noise.
I've mentioned before that my handwriting makes l, I and '
indistingishable, and of coirse I can read my handwriting.
If you have to use a medium that restricts the Klingon character set
in order to transmit possibly ambiguous data, I suggest you uuencode
it, or use k for Q and x for '. As they are non-Klingon letters they
will stand out, and your reader should be able to infer what they are
and either read through them or do search and replace.
SIBIX JABBIXIDVAM DALADLAHXAX? BIKAPBEXCHUGH CHAQ NGOQ DASOVNIS.
Remember that the Klingon writing system is just a transcription
system. You could speak fluent Klingon and write it in a way
unintelligible to me. I saw a language where there is a mark for each
consonant and a default following vowel. You put various marks under
or over the consonant if there is a different or no following vowel.
That would work nicely for Klingon.
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