Re: TECH: Unicode 5.1

With Klingon you have problems above and beyond its conlang status, in
that the writing system put forward for inclusion is not even itself
officially part of the language. The only official orthography of the
language is the Roman one; the "real" pIqaD is as mythical as the home
planet itself.  Sure, there are fonts and a transliteration, but based
on a completely arbitrary mapping of a subset of the glyphs seen
onscreen to the Roman letters, which has never been blessed by anyone,
certainly not anyone with the initials M.O. (of whom there are two
pertinent to the discussion).

So what we have is the pIqaDqoq ("so-called pIqaD").   Sure, the KLI
uses it in the title pages of its publications, but the KLI has no
official status, other than the blessing of the Star Trek copyright
holders to do what they do without threat of legal action.  It's just
a bunch of linguists, mostly the amateur variety, who study Klingon
for fun.  And using the pIqaDqoq is certainly fun.  But I can see why
the Unicode Consortium would reject it.

Although the argument that nobody uses it strikes me as the cart
pulling the horse.  If it were available in Unicode, I'm sure many
Klingonists would use it.

But my point is, the rejection of Klingon doesn't necessarily
demonstrate a bias against recent and/or "con-" orthographies. If
Tengwar is ever finally rejected, that's another matter.

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