Klingon transliteration, was Re: Fave Conlangs

From: "Padraic Brown" <agricola@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2002 12:12 PM
Subject: Re: Fave Conlangs WAS: Silindion


| Am 24.03.02, Raymond Brown yscrifef:
|
| > >- 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. The "stupid" notation
| was made for _mass_ appeal; not for linguists. Johnny Galacticon
| isn't interested in the IPA; he wants to know how to say "today
| is a good day to die". Klingon romanisation scheme does a pretty
| good job, all things taken into consideration.

It does work, and I know Okrand thought it out pretty well and didn't just
arbitrate random letters. But mainly for fun, I did come up with an alternative
transliteration system for Klingon using a one-letter-per-phoneme rule (with a
couple digraph exceptions) and non-case-sensitive representation, even though
Tlingan Hol has no capital letters.

My changes are, using the format Okrand > Wier:

ch > c
D > d
gh > g
H > h
I > i
ng is unchanged
Q > x
S > s
tlh > tl
' (apostrophe-glottal stop) should be written as a "high nine" apostrophe, if
possible -- this does not apply to plain-text e-mails since this falls outside
of ASCII and even Latin-1 (it's Unicode value is hex 2019, but is found at hex
92 in Windows Western).

The good thing about Okrand's standard notation is that it's both phonetic and
phonemic. My system just looks better to me when written. ;)

~Danny~

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