Re: new Klingon spelling

Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:

> On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 09:41:58PM -0500, Doug Dee wrote:
> > The idea of using capitals to draw attention to unexpected sounds might be
> > reasonable enough, but the implementation seems utterly random.
>
> Not at all.  Let's review.
>
> a       /A/             standard Romance value
Is it? I don't speak any Romance language, but have heard most of them by
know, and the /a/'s usually sounds more like [a] than [A]. Indeed, I've met
hispanophones unable to tell [A:] from [o:].


> q       /q/             This one is odd.  Should probably be capitalized;
>                         perhaps Okrand was hoping its appearance without
>                         usually having a following 'u' would be enough to
>                         cause English speakers to stop and question, while
>                         leaving <Q> available for the affricate?
Many Westerners seem to automatically supply an 'u' after all 'q's. I've seen
**Al-Quaeda with vomit-inducing frequency the last few years, and the Chinese
dynasty-names 'Qin' and 'Qing' are regularly barabarized as **Quin and **Quing
(the Swedish translation of Jan Wong's "Red China Blues" has 'q' and 'qu' in
totally free variation; you even find 'Qinghai' and 'Quinghai' on the same
page!). I could go on.

                                                               Andreas

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