tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jun 28 08:12:27 2009
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Re: Klingon orthography (was: Okrand at qep'a')
On 28 Jun 2009, at 15:09, ghunchu'wI' wrote:
> I think the idea is that you'd have to use a special keyboard driver
> if you wanted to type without needing to do workarounds like the
> four-keypress dance he said he uses for the glottal stop character.
I do that dance on my standard day-to-day keyboard which allows me to
type a great many characters. If I were using that as a high-frequencu
> At least one of his proposals seems to contain a character which
> isn't yet supported on many platforms using *any* keystrokes.
Technically none of them are proposals; I didn't advocate one over any
of the others -- I was looking for initial feedback about what sorts
of things were more successful, what sorts of things were less
successful, etc.
> Given that special effort would be required in any event, I have no
> idea why he is so dismissive of the existing PUA mapping for Klingon
> text.
Because PUA mapping isn't easily portable. Even though not yet widely
supported, LATIN SMALL LETTER Q WITH TAIL THROUGH DESCENDER is a
genuine encoded character and if you use its code point in a text you
will be able to transmit that entity safely and there is only one
interpretation as to what it is. A PUA character can be anything; you
can't know what it is absent a specific agreement between sender and
receiver, and in many applications sometimes PUA characters can't be
searched for or have other limitations.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/