tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jun 23 12:23:50 2009
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Re: Klingon orthography
> > Michael Everson wrote:
>
> > Marc has never been particularly computer-savvy, so I doubt he's
> > given it much thought.
>
> But now that we are in a world of Unicode, with all computer platforms
> conforming to the same character set technology (where U and u and Q
> and q are not distinguished and can be confused) it is not
> unreasonable to ask him to think about these things now.
As a programmer who has worked a lot with Klingon, especially in databases,
I'm going to have to disagree with this statement. A computer sees q, Q, u
and U as different symbols, each with their own binary code. It's only
confusing to a human. My computer has had no issues working with the current
Klingon orthography. It'll happily convert it to unicode (PUA) based pIqaD
(which seems like a much more useful project to work on that trying to
change a romanization system).
I've created for various systems for inputting pIqaD naively for Windows. (
http://klingon-empire.org/forum/showthread.php?t=6153 - Vista/7,
/wiki/index.php?Chatting%20in%20pIqaD - XP). It works
great on the web, in Windows itself and in other unicode compliant
applications. Linux can have pIqaD support added quite easily and MacOSX
shouldn't be hard to do since it already has a Klingon local.
Instead of trying to change the current system that works great no matter
your system of transcription (pen, pencil, computer, PDA) let's try and get
more pIqaD support. Yes, it's a system semi-created by the KLI, but it gets
us to the same point you want to be at without having to republish every
piece of Klingon work ever done. If it was rejected because there isn't
enough communications occuring in it, all we have to do is increase it's
usage. To me this is like complain that romaji isn't good enough while not
even having support for Kanji/Kana.
qurgh