tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jan 30 00:54:29 2002
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Re: Alphabet
At 5:46 AM +0300 1/30/02, Aryeh ben Naphtali wrote:
>ghItlh slapdash <[email protected]>
>>On Tue, 29 Jan 2002, Aryeh ben Naphtali wrote:
>>> I vote for syllabary (like Sumerian, Akkadian, early Ugaritic and
>>> Phoenician, modern Amkharic, Japanese Kana).
>>The problem with a syllabary is that if you don't have restrictions
>>on the number of consonants and vowels, or the formations of, it gets
>>a bit complicated, and you have many, many characters (for lack of a
>>better term) to remember. I see Klingon as just complicated enough
>>that your syllabary would be fairly large. It doesn't following the
>>(C)V or C (only the "nh" sound) form of Japanese (not familiar with
>>the rest), which keeps the Japanese syllabary a reasonable size (46,
>>right?).
>I.J.Gelb of Chicago Oriental Institute has dealt with the problem.
You'll forgive me, but I'm not exceedingly well read in linguistics,
so I haven't seen I.J.'s work.
>It appears that _all_ Semitic syllabaries later developed into alphabets
>(originally, they had had "C+any vowel" structure: hence Arabic and Hebrew
>writing systems). In tlhIngan Hol, the same principle is perfectly valid:
>C+any consonant=a syllable (with the exception represented by the cases when
>the syllable is pausal and therefore "mute" (the end of a word)).
I don't know; the CVC thing seems so omnipresent in Klingon that I have
a hard time buying the mute V. Also, if they eventually develop into
alphabets, why wouldn't it have happened by the time a race was warp-
capable? (to mix the linguistic with the fictional :-)
>the close-syllable word, the kind most typical of the language, with look
>like C+V+C(v). All in all (I have counted... sorry, I like maths when I talk
>about languages), the total number of syllable signs appears to be about
>300. This is quite feasible: modern Amkharic has 240 (in practice, I must
>admit, fewer: about 180).
Feasible, perhaps, but likely?
Of course, you may be right. Is Okrand "into" the languages you mention?
At 4:32 AM +0000 1/30/02, Sean Healy wrote:
>Well, there are 2625 possible syllables in tlhIngan Hol according to what we know: 21 consonants * 5 vowels * (21 consonants + 3 consonant clusters + 1 null), so a true syllabary would be quite large.
That's what I was thinking, though I hadn't done the math. Thanks for the
number.
>But if you had a CV system, you could get by with 129 symbols: 21 consonants * (5 vowels + 1 null) + 3 clusters, which wouldn't be too bad.
It is much better, but constraining Klingon to CV seems... wrong. It
doesn't fit that pattern in my head. Maybe I'm thinking too much of
Japanese?
>A better route might be like Hebrew, with consonants only, and vowels indicated by diacritics (the technical term for such a consonant-only alphabet is an abjad), which would require only 21 characters.
That was kind of what I was getting at in my post, though I used Arabic
as an example. Is it not the same sort of thing?
Actually, are there any modern abjads that don't even bother with the
diacritic vowels?
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