Re: Fave Conlangs WAS: Silindion

--- In conlang@y..., Padraic Brown <agricola@W...> wrote:

> > >- Klingon is dead ugly and uses an exceptionally stupid notation
> >
> > But wasn't Klingon meant to be dead ugly and weird?
>
> It's no uglier than German or English.
I must protest.  German has only pure velar and palatal /x/ and /C/.
Klingon has /q/ and /X/, plus retroflexes...

Then again, some one this list have declared a liking of uvulars and
retroflexes.  =P

And after all, Klingons are crude, loud and harsh, so their language
had to be so as well.  Mark did a good job on that.



> The "stupid" notation
> was made for _mass_ appeal; not for linguists.
I think both the ignorant masses and the linguists would have
preferred a case-insensitive system, especially since it's so
unnecessary.  I would understand Mark's decision to use I, E, D
etc. if he used i, e, d for other sounds, but he didn't.
Similarly, he uses q and Q, but neither k nor K.

The case-sensitive transliteration makes the use of written
Klingon much more difficult (beginning a sentence with a lowercase
letter just hurts) while making it harder for "Johnny Galacticon"
to remember.

How many misspellings of Qapla' have you seen on the web?  They're
innumerable (únótime... one of the few words I know in Quenya! =).


> Johnny Galacticon
> isn't interested in the IPA; he wants to know how to say "today
> is a good day to die".
Funny that you should say that...  Mark's transliteration is actually
pretty close to X-SAMPA.  He uses <q E I> for /q E I/, although
<k e i> would have been available.  The use of <q> fosters the
mispronunciation as /kw/, while the capital <I> is a pain to discern
from <l>, especially in the non-seriff fonts used in the book.
Similarly, <D S> are used for /d` s`/, although <d s> are not used.

The problem is: Any linguist could remember the rules (Klingon d and s
are retroflex, k is uvular, q is an uvular affricate, e and i are
lax etc...) without using capitals (D, S, q, Q, E, I respectively).
Good old "Johnny Galacticon" will mispronounce them anyway -- even
more so if the spelling looks weird in his eyes.

All in all, the spelling causes a lot of discomfort for very little
gain.

Does anyone have an e-Mail address of Mark Okrand that he could
forward to me?  I'd be interested in discussing the issue with him
personally.


-- Christian Thalmann

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