tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun May 17 07:10:29 2009
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Re: recent boing boing post and Unicode
On May 16, 2009, at 5:36 PM, Terrence Donnelly wrote:
> Writing an algorithm to convert romanized Hol to a pIqaD-friendly
> format is relatively trivial.
If you can assume the source document is well-formed, and that it
contains Klingon letters only, then it's easy. It's not much harder
to include a check for unreasonable alphabetic characters (e.g.
"k"). But what do you do with punctuation? Commas and periods have
a traditional mapping to up- and down-pointing triangles, but that's
it. Do you map question marks to periods and rely on grammar to
convey the difference? Do you count semicolons and dashes as comma-
like pauses as well? What do you do with quotations?
Mixed-language source introduces an entirely different set of
challenges, with the question of how to resolve them being somewhat
more philosophical than technical. /QQ/QQ0407.html?
mode=XIFAN shows one possibility, though there are still glitches.
-- ghunchu'wI'