tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu May 29 17:28:26 2003
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Re: Klingon Alphabet
- From: "d'Armond Speers" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Klingon Alphabet
- Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 16:21:59 -0600
>From: Klingon Emperor <[email protected]>
>Reply-To: [email protected]
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: Re: Klingon Alphabet
>Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 13:25:58 -0700 (PDT)
>
>Just saying that it sure would be nice if, when teaching the language to
>our children or fellow linguists, we could say, "now we're going to talk
>about the letter <?>...it makes this sound..." and so on and so forth.
>When we take foreign language classes at school or college, the names of
>the letters and the alphabet are the first things to be taught. I hope one
>day Okrand makes up names for the letters. Seems too Earthling to keep
>calling the letters what they are in English.
But do you understand that we're not using letters of the Klingon alphabet?
The way we write Klingon is not they way Klingons write it. We don't know
anything about their writing system. Our orthography uses characters that
we as Terrans can recognize; they tell us how Klingons pronounce the words.
So it doesn't make sense to think that the Klingon language would contain
words to give names to the characters of our writing system. Maybe there
are words for the characters of their writing system ({pIqaD}), but as we
don't know anything about that system, there's no way we could use them
intelligently. And they still wouldn't correspond to the writing system we
use on this list.
--Holtej 'utlh
>David Trimboli <[email protected]> wrote:> David Trimboli wrote:From: "Dr.
>Jeremy DM Cowan"
> > Just a minor note: it's important to remember that this stuff we type in
> > e-mail and read in TKD is NOT a Klingon alphabet. It is a transcription
> > system invented by Federation linguists to describe the sounds of
>Klingon.
> > We know very little about the Klingon writing system(s). For all we
>know,
> > they do not mark the glottal stops in any way. We DO know that the
> > transcription system makes the glottal stops at the beginning of
>otherwise
> > vowel-initial words explicit.
>
>From: "Klingon Emperor"
> > Is there a name for the letters in the Klingon alphabet? Seems a bit
>silly going around calling 'a' the letter "ae" and 'b' the
> > letter "bee." To me, that should have been one of the first things done
>for this language, make formal names for the letters
> > in Klingon.
>
>As I just said, the system we use (marking sounds like /tlh/ with that
>letter combination) is not the system Klingons use. Klingons have their own
>writing system that we know very little about. We don't even know if it's
>an alphabet. It might be pictographic, or syllabic, or something else.
>
>We don't have information about how the Klingon writing system(s) works
>because Mike Okuda, scenic designer for Star Trek shows (starting with The
>Next Generation), wanted to be able to put up pictures of Klingon writing
>without having to worry about what it means.
>
>Since we don't know anything about the Klingon writing system, how can we
>possibly know what they call the symbols?
>
>SuStel
>Stardate 3407.2
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