tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jun 09 19:29:53 2003
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Re: Klingon Alphabet
ja' marqoS:
>...pIqaD *is* the definite
>writing system; we just don't know anything about it other than its name,
>and apparently aren't likely ever to.
Actually, TKD does tell us something quite useful about pIqaD.
TKD page 14: "Those few Klingons who pronounce {b} as {m} would say Klingon
{baH} /fire (a torpedo)/ and {maH} /we/ the same way, and have to memorize
which word is spelled which way."
The first item of interest is that pIqaD "spells" words. More telling,
however, is the revelation that if your dialect doesn't distinguish between
the sounds of {m} and {b}, you'll have more work to do when writing than
someone who's dialect *does* make that distinction. The obvious conclusion
is that pIqaD is a transcription system which ideally represents sounds.
That might be an alphabet, or a syllabary, or something similar.
But it's not an arbitrary mapping of meaning to symbol in the manner of
pictographs. If it were, speakers of the standard dialect would have the
same difficulty memorizing the symbols as everyone else.
Prefixes and suffixes might have special treatment, of course, but words in
pIqaD are apparently written to correspond with the way they sound.
-- ghunchu'wI'