At the time of writing this letter it has not yet hit the UTC Document
Register, but I have recently submitted a document revisiting the
ever-popular issue of the encoding of Klingon "pIqaD". The reason
always given why it could not be encoded was that it did not enjoy
enough usage, and so I've collected a bunch of examples to demonstrate
that this is not true (scans and also web pages, etc.) So the issue
comes back up, and time to talk about it again.
Michael Everson: I basically copied your 1997 proposal into the
document, with some minor changes. I hope you don't mind. And if you
don't want to be on the hook for providing the glyphs to UTC, I can do
that. I think that proposal should serve as a starting-point for
discussion anyway. There are some things that maybe should be different:
1. the "SYMBOL FOR EMPIRE" also known as the "MUMMIFICATION GLYPH". I
don't know where the second name comes from, I don't know how important
it is to encode it, and I don't know how much of a trademark headache it
will cause with Paramount, as it is used pretty heavily in their
imagery. Something we'll have to talk about.
2. I put in the COMMA and FULL STOP, which were not in the original
proposal but were in the ConScript registry entry. The examples I have
show them clearly being used. UTC may decide to unify them with
existing triangular shapes, which may or may not be a good idea.
3. For my part, I've invented a pair of ampersands for Klingon (Klingon
has two words for "and": one for joining verbs/sentences and one for
joining nouns (the former goes between its "conjunctands", the latter
after them)), from ligatures of the letters in question. The pretty
much have NO usage, of course (and are not in the proposal), but maybe
they should be presented to the community.
Document is available at http://web.meson.org/downloads/pIqaDReturns.pdf
Let the bickering begin!
~mark
