----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Everson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2004 6:28 PM Subject: Re: Klingon
> At 18:06 +0100 2004-01-15, Philippe Verdy wrote: > >From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > Michael Everson scripsit: > > > > > > > > yIjachQo'. vItlhob. > > > > >> Demonstrating once again that the One True Script for Klingon is Latin. > > > >Not really: look at how uppercase letters are used: case mapping, which is > >quite safe in languages written with the Latin script, completely breaks the > >Klingon text... > > > >Michael did not write: "Yijachqo'. Vitlhob." > > Many Latin-script languages write capital letters > in non-initial positions. Irish does quite > regularly: "an tS�n" 'China'. Breton does > sometimes. It is common in transliterations of > Tibetan. I admit this exists, I don't think it's a good idea to use such weak conventions, which are justified only by the fact that one is technically constrained to use a restricted subset of Latin. If people could use more distinctive letters in Latin, such caveats would be avoided. For Breton, I don't agree with you. Even if Breton has the trigraph <c'h> considered as one letter, and whose appropriate titlecase is the trigraph <C'H>, not the trigraph <C'h>. See "Aber Wrac'h", also written in uppercase "ABER WRAC'H". Words starting by the trigraph letter <c'h> are rare in Breton, but even in that case, I see NO use of such "abuse" of Latin letter case other than a way to represent a missing diacritic or a missing letter. > Of course, Philippe seems to be suggesting that the One True Script for Klingon is *not* Latin, > because he thinks that yIjachQo' is not Latin, while Yijach1o' is. Which is, well, incredible. No, I said that both are Latin, but they would be considered equal under case-insensitive searches, despite they are really coding distinct letters. For example the Klingon Mandel "Q" is mostly a Mandel "qH", but bot a simple Mandel "q", and is still distinct from Mandel "qh" (which is mostly like a French "r")... The presence of case distinctions as meaning strong primary letter distinctions in these conventions just denotes a missing diacritic or separate letter for the Latin transliteration...This is still a (very poor) transliteration system, with its imperfections, and as with other transliteration systems, it breaks the initial script design and semantic structure and is a clear sign that this is a plain separate script (as it was the intent of Tolkien when he created the script).
