tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jan 11 10:36:55 2000
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RE: ABC's
>Does any one know the order of the Klingon alphabet?
DujHoD:
: ghobe'. Just before the Klingon-English word list. The order, IIRC, is:
: a, b, ch, D, e, gh, H, I, j, l, m, n, ng, o, p, q, Q, r, S, t, tlh, u,
: v, w, y, '
DloraH:
>The order we place the words in is to help us look up the words, that's
>why it matches English so closely. We do not have a Klingon alphabet.
>We just have the phonetics placed in an order which we are familiar with
>for he purpose of searching.
DujHoD:
: Did Okrand say that, or is that just your assumption? If the case is the
: latter, jIQoch.
Keep in mind that in his books and tapes, Okrand always role-plays the part of
a Federation linguist who seems to be part of a team studying Klingon based on
materials supplied by Starfleet. As such, he uses the phonetic transcription
devised by those linguists. (OK, a real phonetic system used by professional
linguists would probably have many diacritics - both superscript and subscript
- as well as some unusual IPA-like letters. But Okrand was limited to what was
on a standard U.S. typewriter keyboard so as to not overly confuse the actors
in ST3 and, later, probably also at the request of his editor at Pocket
Books.) So the order of letters is the one used by Okrand et al. for their
"research" notes - purely a standard filing convention familiar to Federation
Standard speakers.
BTW, if you want to extend the role-playing game a bit further, think of the
non-Okrandian spellings seen in the closed captions, scripts, and reference
materials produced by Paramount and Pocket Books as evidence of a different
system for transcribing the sounds of Klingon used by non-linguists in the
Federation. Thus it is Worf, K'tinga and Gre'thor in this more popular system
but {wo'rIv}, {qItI'nga}/{qItI'nga'} and {ghe''or}/{ghe'tor} in Okrand's
system. Same words, different spellings - neither of which is used by the
Klingons themselves when writing their native {pIqaD} script. (In fact, we
have no idea how {pIqaD} works.)
--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons