tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jan 31 10:35:33 2002
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Re: pIqaD
Once more, from the top:
While I think the KLI pIqaDqoq is cool enough that I have gone to the trouble
of learning how to read it (though there is so little I've found written with
it that I've never developed much skill at reading it quickly -- I really miss
the days when the HolQeD envelope said different things instead of always
{qo'mey poSmoH Hol} in pIqaDvam), I also respect that this is a fan thing and
not really a canon thing.
The truth continues to be that in both the TV and movies, Okuda is the artistic
director on the sets and he alone writes all the Klingon script. He "greeks"
it. It never says anything. He arbitrarily picks out characters that he thinks
look nice together. He does try to remain consistent whenever similar things
have something written on them, he tries to make the writing on them identical
or similar. That's it. You'll never be able to read anything on any set on the
TV show or the movies.
Meanwhile, in Turkey in the 1920s or so, the Attaturk (I'm probably misspelling
that) was a benevalent despot and decided the Turkish language needed updating.
He hired a French linguist and "fixed" the language. The first thing they did
was throw out the Arabic alphabet they had been using and replace it with a
phonetic Romanized alphabet. Now, everything is spelled like it's pronounced
and pronounced like it is spelled.
They also regularized all the verbs and cleaned up the grammar. It is probably
as close to an artificial language actually spoken by a whole country's
population as has ever existed in the world, though it is strongly based on the
natural language that had preceeded it.
In that spirit, I don't see a problem with having the small group of Klingon
speakers, isolated on a little blue and green planet far away from Kronos
developing an alternative writing system, using the characters that already
existed on Kronos, but using them as a phonetic alphabet, as proposed by the
KLI. We just use it for internal communication here on this planet. If we go
anywhere else, we shouldn't expect anyone to understand anything we've written.
Meanwhile, for now, there are only two forms of written Klingon that we know.
One is the Romanized system used in all of Okrand's works, and used here for
convenience because it suits our keyboards and Email systems well. The other is
the KLI pIqaD, which we can use when printing things with our personal
computers, or when writing things by hand, if we build that skill.
We cannot ever expect to see this proprietary Earth-dialect pIqaD on any of the
TV shows or movies. In the Trek universe, those writings are done using
whatever ta' Hol is current in that time setting on QonoS.
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.
charghwI'
> 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.
> ********************
>
> Well! It's beginning to look like pIqaD is at least becoming Paramount Hol.
Good news
IMO, maybe as it gets used more, the powers that be will canonize it. It was
all over
the Klingon ship in this weeks Enterprise episode.
> I sure was wishing I was a lot farther along in tlhIngan Hol, so I could
have understood
more of what they were saying. So, how well did they do on this episode?
>
> vIghro' ( Cat >^..^< )
> PS, Is any one using vIghro' for their name? If not would it be an
acceptable name for
me?
>
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