Re: pIqaD

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

willm@cstone.net wrote:

> 
> We don't know anything about the greeked stuff that Okuda puts out except that 
> it definitely has no language behind it. Characters there are chosen to suit 
> his artistic preference. You can pretend that it represents language that 
> nobody understands except for fictional characters, if you like. I tend to 
> simply be offended by Okuda's power play and wish he'd leave language to the 
> linguists and get out of the way of an official canon pIqaD.
> 


Okay, I'll bite... (dangerous thing to say when there are klingons 
around)...

Has someone ever asked Marc Okrand about the writing system?

That being said, I personally (and I'm not a linguist, although the 
subject has always had great fascination to me) suspect that an 
alphabetic script would work well for Klingon; the sound system really 
does to me seem a lot more alphabetical than syllabic, and seems regular 
enough in the way that one could imagine being imposed by an alphabetic 
writing system.

Someone mentioned Atatürk and Turkish; it is certainly not the only 
modern language which has had recent spelling reforms and thus are spelt 
in an extremely regular fashion (Spanish and Norwegian come to mind.) 
Personally I would dare to guess that a Klingon probably would look very 
strange at a human trying to explain the concept of an "official" 
spelling, and that they simply spell things the way they would pronounce 
them.  This is another way a language would get spelt in a highly 
phonetic fashion.

	-hpa