tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jan 29 08:31:03 2002

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing



[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: pIqaD



From: <[email protected]>
> I have read Lawrence's article "Some Comments on Orthography"  on the KLI
site as well as what little Mark wrote concerning pIqaD in TDK.
> A direct quote from TDK, pg 11:
> "There is a native writing system for Klingon (called pIqaD) which seems
to be well suited to the various dialects"    More follows, but AFAIAC this
one comment by Okrand made pIqaD official in MY mind.   The key word being
'is'.  Not 'might be' or 'could be' or 'may be'.  What follows in that page
11 paragraph seems to open doors for more 'discoveries' about the Klingon
writing system.


But WE, the Klingon language community, cannot invent this stuff ourselves.
We're studying the language presented to us by Marc Okrand, not making it up
ourselves.

Yes,  there IS a /pIqaD/.  The problem is, WE DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT IT.
You say you use /pIqaD/.  How?  By using what you find on the KLI's website?
That's pretty and all, but it's not THE /pIqaD/ talked about in TKD.  It's
just the known symbols used in a way that some guy threw together.

>   I used pIqaD to write the words tlhIngan Hol on the cover of a study
book I made for myself.
> So maybe if someone did write a note to a Klingon using pIqaD he wouldn't
be able to read it.... but I would.  I might not be able to understand it,
but I could read it, just as I used to be able to read quite a bit of
Japanese, but didn't understand much of it.


If you learned to speak Japanese, but not to read it at all (not an unusual
situation), and someone handed you a page full of Japanese characters, to be
used as you liked, you might be tempted to turn them into an alphabet, or
something else.  But it would have no relation to actual written Japanese
beyond the shapes of the characters.  It would be gibberish.  That's the
situation with the imaginary pIqaD on the KLI's site.  Lacking any knowledge
of how the characters are really used, someone came up with something
completely arbitrary.

SuStel
Stardate 2079.6


Back to archive top level