Re: new Klingon spelling

On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 06:36:42PM -0500, Tristan McLeay wrote:
> My understanding is that, because Klingon was designed to be read by
> non-linguistically inclined people (actors), Okrand used capital letters
> to lemind people of the special pronunciation, even if the lowercase
> letter was unused.
Thank you, Tristan.  That's it exactly.  The orthography was chosen to
make native English-speakers stop and think about what they were saying
before they said it.  Although, it seems that whenver Dr. Okrand wasn't
around to coach, this was insufficient; just check out any of the
many TNG episodes where <Q> comes out as [k_w].  Bleah.)

You can use a different system if you want, but most Klingonists won't even
bother to try to make sense of it.  Keep in mind that Okrand's
Romanization is the ONLY official writing system for Klingon;
the supposed native system (pIqaD) is and shall remain unknown,
to allow the Paramount set dressers freedom to do whatever they want with
"Klingon glyphs".  The "pIqaDqoq" ("so-called pIqaD") used by the
KLI is just a mapping of some of the glyphs seen on set to the
Roman orthography.

The grammar is explained in _The_Klingon_Dictionary_ - and nowhere else,
due to copyright considerations.  But you should be able to pick up
a copy of TKD pretty cheap.

However, since the pronunciation descriptions in TKD are typical
phoque-English, here's a more precise description of the sounds:

Okrandian       CXS
a               A
b               b or b_h (*)      ([mb] or [m] in some dialects)
ch              tS)
D               d`
e               E
gh              G
H               x
I               I
j               dZ)
l               l
m               m
n               n
ng              N
o               o
p               p_h
q               q_h
Q               qX)
r               4
S               s`
t               t_h
tlh             tK)
u               u
v               v
w               w
y               j
'               ?

[*] Stop aspiration is optional but preferred; Klingon is all about forceful
    speech.  Spitting on your listeners is perfectly acceptable.

-Mark