tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jun 24 01:55:21 2009
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Re: Klingon orthography (was: Okrand at qep'a')
On 24 Jun 2009, at 05:07, ghunchu'wI' wrote:
> On Jun 23, 2009, at 7:07 PM, Michael Everson wrote:
>
>>> That's a shortcoming of Google, not of the underlying data.
>>
>> I don't believe that this is correct. Case-pairing is a normative
>> element of the Unicode Standard, and the Unicode Standard is the
>> basis
>> for character encoding on all platforms now and for the future.
>
> Case-pairing is by no means mandatory.
It is normative.
> It's an extra step that can simply be left out.
You can't "delete" case equivalences from the Standard.
> That Google fails to give its users the option of doing so doesn't
> make it a fundamental impossibility.
There are other operations besides searching that are also impacted by
canonical casing equivalence.
>>> If any nonreversible operation is accidentally applied to any data,
>>> the original is lost. This is a consequence of the very nature of a
>>> nonreversible operation, not a shortcoming of the data itself.
>>
>> Casing operations ARE reversible, if case-pairing equivalences are
>> respected.
>
> "Respecting case-pairing equivalences" is cheating, because it lets
> you claim that "S. Ewing MacHines" is equivalent to "sewing
> machines". :-)
Those strings are different because one contains ". " and the other
does not.
god is equivalent to God and to goD and to GoD and to GOd and to GOD.
> Okay, maybe not, but it's still bringing in something extra that
> specifically supports your contention that there's something wrong
> with using {q} and {Q} as separate letters. If you instead respect
> case *distinctions*, which is easier for a computer to do than to
> ignore them, the "problem" vanishes.
I want to respect case distinctions. I'd be very happy if Klingon
orthography could write personal names like Qugh, Ghawran, Lursa',
Be'etor, Qeng, Viqsis, Mogh, Hus, and 'Atrom (KGT p. 197) with capital
letters. Standard Klingon Latin orthography does *not* respect the
casing distinction between Q and q, however, because (Standard
Okrandian) Qugh and qeng are different words. Xugh and Qeng would
solve that, or Qugh and Keng would, or QÌugh and Qeng, or Æugh and
Qeng, etc.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/