tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Jun 27 22:36:04 2009

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Re: Klingon orthography (was: Okrand at qep'a')

qa'vaj ([email protected])



On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 12:06 PM, Michael Everson <[email protected]>wrote:
>
> ===
> So! Is there scope for a spelling reform in the Latin orthography for
> Klingon?
>
> Qapla'!
>
>
>
Given the noticeable advance in Unicode support and internationalization
over the past few years, I think this is worth considering.  But I have a
few questions and comments.

-- Are the options that you displayed selected so that each one can be typed
with a single standard internationalized keyboard from the set that are
provided by Linux / Windows / Mac?  Or would we need to construct a special
keyboard for some of them?

-- How would words be sorted in each? (that is, what would the sort order be
of words in each option compared to the sort order implied by the usual
order in which the Klingon alphabet is listed).

I take it that the presumption in your proposal is that the PUA is
unworkable, and we'll never get our own ligit code point allocation.  But
some other options occur to me that may be worth putting on the table:

(Wild and crazy option): How close can we come to something that looks like
the KLI typeface by selecting glyphs from across the unicode map?  We would
have to use a specially-constructed keyboard (not that hard, I've done it
for both Windows and Linux), and the sort order would be pot-luck, and it
might come out looking like a movie-cliche' ransom note, but I'm curious
what the result would look like.

(Possibly workable option): We Klingonist might collectively agree that
we'll do without being able to routinely browse pages in Glagolitic or some
other ancient script, and overload the code points with our own typeface
(KLI pIqaD).  It would be nice to select a code set allocation that web
browsers and applications would automatically identify.  That way we could
preserve sort order, and the software tools would be none the wiser.


-- 
qa'vaj
qo'lIj DachenmoHtaH






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