tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Mar 03 17:07:32 1999

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RE: Written Language: tlhingon Hol and pIqaD

Welcome to the list, David. My name is pagh, and I am the current Beginners'
Grammarian for the list. It's my job to help beginners learn Klingon.
Whenever you have a post you want help with, mark it for my attention with a
KLBC in the subject line.

jatlh David Joslyn:

----------

Greetings:

I am David Joslyn, full time student of language, linguistics,
entomologies, and other such related subjects and occational student of
tlhingon Hol. As a Trekker, I take a great deal of interest in anything
that furthers the knowledge of the many and varied cultures encounters in
the series. There is one point regarding tlhingon culture that I feel
needs to be made; it regards the tlhingon writing sysem: pIqaD.

Looking at the Klingon Language Dictionary one finds immediately that
there are three basic parts to the structure of tlhingon: "core words"
whose meanings may or may not be derived from other words; the numerous
affixes modifying those "core words"; and the chuvmey of conjuction,
prepositions, and what have you. This suggests to me a written structure
akin to Chinese or Japanese in structure, i.e. phono-ideographs ("kanji")
respresenting complete word-thought ideas and a groups of similar symbols
for the prefixes and suffixes so prevalent inthe language. (It may be
noted that, initially, Klingons were paralleled with Communists China and 
the Romulans equated with the Soviet Union. Only recently has the
relationship been more along US-Russia lines.)

Indeed the are advantages to this system. Regardless of how a person
actually pronounces the words, the written form stays genrally the same
throughout. Ruling over a large empire as they do, the High Counsil would
want to communicate its laws and rulings as swiftly and with as little
confusion as possible. Such a written form of tlhingon Hol could go a long
way towards that end. (Futhermore, it may be noted that tlhingon is the
ONLY language in Star Trek that is consistantly NOT TRANSLATED. Most
starfleet officers speek English, or some varient thereof, making it
difficult to understand Chinese-style languages; though why the universal
translators don't seem to work is another matter, entirely)

[*Cultural side note: Such a unified system of writting could have come
into being in the years immediatly following the "disappearance" of
Kahless the Unforgetable as an effort to unify the diverse peasant
populations who fought in his army to overthrow the old emperor. Thus
would it represent the teaching of Kahless and the culture(s) of that
time.*] 

My second gripe concernes the ording of the pIqaD. I am in no way denying
the usefulness of a phonetic system in a language; for one thing it make
transliterating "foriegn" words easier. I do not think, however that the
pIqaD would be ordered similarly to our "a,b,g,d,..." of Phonecian origin.
Looking at cultural similarities again, I propose an ordering more closely
related to the "futharc" of the Nore-Germanic tongues. (Was German also
one of the languages Okrand used to construct tlhingon Hol?)

On a related note: most "alphabetic" writting systems have some additional
meaning besides phonetic value. Usually this is a derivative of an actual
word in the laguage containing the sound to be represented, and thus tend
to be simplyfied versions of the original "glyph". Additionally, there is
often a numerical meaning assigned to some of the "letters". This could be
reflected, not only in the counting system, but in the tlhingon musical
note scale. (Klingons sing so I assume such an instructional scale
exists.) Thirdly there seems to be evidence of a "heraldic" use of glyphs.
In one episode of ST:TNG (I do not recall the title) the Duras sisers
point out the meeaning of the marks on a particular D'k tagh. These could
have been mongrams of a sort, but one of the glyph indicated the presence
of an son, at that time unborn. This and the symbol of the Klingon Empire
are the only canon examples I can readily come up with.

My third point concerns the style of Klingon writing. Here I have no
problems. Based on the appearance of pIqaD I am forced to conclude that
originally, tlhingon was written in a method much akin to cunnuiform, i.e.
with sharp, wedge-shaped sticks pressed into a clay riverbed or tablet.
With the advent of metal, carving words into wood, bone, stone, and then
metal itself would quite naturally occur, perhaps altering a few glyphs to
reflect the change in medium.

Scratching, however, does not lend itself to writting on paper. I
think-and again, this is Sino-Japanese influence-that writting brushes
were deloped by the various priests for just such a purpose. Nowadays I'm
sure that when Kilngons write on paper-or some similar substance, say an
animal skin, :)-some form of pen or brush is used. {*I can find no word
for "ink" in tlhingon, but I'm sure it's related somehow to the tlhingon
word for "blood". :)*]


I would love to hear anyone's opion ragarding this unfortunate cultural
oversight in my favorite Star Trek species.

----------------

I'm sure a few of people will comment at length on this; all I have at the
moment are a few comments. The pIqaD you see on TV and in the movies is an
artistic creation of the production staff, and has absolutely nothing to do
with actual tlhIngan Hol. Mike Okuda, in particular, has said that the
glyphs displayed will always be "greeked", and will never have any meaning.
As a result, I wouldn't take any of it too seriously. 

The KLI has a font disk with 36 (10 are for numbers) of these glyphs and a
mapping of these glyphs to the various sounds of the language, and some of
us can even read this pseudo-pIqaD. The glyphs are ordered based on the
English alphabetical order of the roman symbols they correspond to. This
system is not much closer to the real Klingon writing system than the roman
writing system we usually use, but it does look exotic and cool.

My point here is that we can speculate all we want, but we really don't know
anything substantive about pIqaD. It may even be that the stuff we see on TV
is not real pIqaD either, but some sort of military code.

Note that the spoken Klingon in the movies is another matter entirely. Most
of it was done by Marc Okrand, and while the pronunciation varies in
quality, it is all real tlhIngan Hol, and certainly worth paying attention
to.

> Qa'pla

Qapla'


pagh
Beginners' Grammarian

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