tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jun 10 06:14:01 1999

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RE: modified Klingon spelling


I can tell you that if you write to this list using your modified Klingon spelling, I
won't read it.  The words of Krankor are relevant here (from the FAQ):

"You know, when you go to France, you don't tell them it's silly to write a c with a
thingy on it to make an s sound ("why not just use s? I always confuse the cedilla with a
normal c, and besides, s is so much easier to type!"). Indeed, in a standard ASCII font,
there is no way to distinguish a cedilla-d c from a normal one, but, remarkably, nobody
tries to change the way we write French on the net. Nobody tries to do sa m'est egal
instead of ca m'est egal. Similarly, when you join a tlhIngan Hol group, you don't change
the writing either. As far as I'm concerned, it is simple arrogance to come into a group
and say "Hey, you know that language you guys have been reading and writing just fine? I'm
changing it!"

And, for the record, I personally tend to not read posts that conspicuously do the I
wrong. They simply are harder for me to read, and I'm unwilling to put in the extra effort
to read it wrong because somebody refused to write it right."

That was posted to this list in 1993.  We've had some people want to use /i/ instead of
/I/, but as far as I can recall, this is the first proposal to completely change the
writing system.  The purpose of the language is to communicate, and the writing convention
facilitates that.  If you use a homemade convention, you will fail to communicate, you
will not be understood, which defeats the whole purpose.

-- Holtej 'utlh

tlhIngan Hol Mailing List FAQ
http://www.bigfoot.com/~dspeers/klingon/faq.htm


> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of
> [email protected]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 1999 10:34 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list
> Subject: modified Klingon spelling
>
>
> I use a slightly different version of the Klingon alphabet.  It avoids the
> "eye vs. ell" problem and makes the text a little bit shorter too.
> a		a
> b		b
> ch		c
> D		d
> e		e
> gh		g
> H		h
> I		i
> j		j
> l		l
> m		m
> n		n
> ng		N
> o		o
> p		p
> q		q
> Q		Q
> r		r
> S		s
> t		t
> tlh		T
> u		u
> v		v
> w		w
> y		y
> '		'
> One other change I recommend but don't use myself is 'q>k', 'Q>q'.
> lay'tel sivten
>
>

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