tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jun 09 22:35:32 2003
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Re: Klingon Alphabet
From: "Alan Anderson" <[email protected]>
> 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.
This is a good point, but I don't think we can read that much into it. For
one thing, mention of the /pIqaD/ on page 11 is part of the "joke" about the
Klingon Encyclopedia. Okrand knew people were going to wonder how to WRITE
Klingon, so he built in this excuse for not having that part in the book.
After that, we should be prepared to take any mention of Klingon writing
about as seriously as we take that paragraph.
In addition, the book mentions (also on page 11) that the /pIqaD/ "seems to
be well suited to the various dialects." It seems odd that on the one hand,
the writing system is well suited to the various dialects, yet on the other
members of one dialect community have to do more work spelling words than
another. This is, I think, another reason not to take mention of the
/pIqaD/ too seriously. Or, at least, not to jump to the conclusion that
it's necessarily sound-based. Knowing Okrand, he'd come up with something
much more clever.
SuStel
Stardate 3439.1