1997-10-17-news.txt

From: "Marc Okrand" <MarcOkrand@msn.com>
Newsgroups: msn.onstage.startrek.expert.okrand
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 19:34:45 -0700
Subject: Re: Klingon Alphabet

I'd love to know more about <pIqaD> as well.  At the risk of shedding very
little light on the situation, I'll ramble a bit.

I assume the distinction SuStel and Qermaq are making between a "phonic"
(or "phonical") writing system and a "phonemic" (or "phonemical") one is
that "phonic" refers to a writing system which indicates all sorts of
phonetic detail (more, even, than the guides to pronunciation of words in
English dictionaries provide).  I think I'd use "phonic" more generally.  A
"phonic" writing system is one based on the sounds of the language (as
opposed to the grammar or something else).  In such a system, a written
character could stand for an individual sound (in which case we'd probably
call the character a "letter" and refer to the writing system as an
"alphabet"), or it could stand for a group of sounds (typically a
syllable).

A "nonphonic" (?) writing system would be one in which each written
character was based on something other than the sound of the word (or part
of a word or whatever) it represented.  Perhaps each character stands for
a full word, regardless of the sound.  The system we use to write numbers
(1, 2, 3, and so on) is of this type.  The character "4" stands for <four>
in an English context, but for <cuatro> in Spanish and, I suppose, for
<loS> in Klingon; same meaning (Klingon mathematicians, let us not quibble
just now), different sounds.

A "phonemic" system is one in which each character represents a distinctive
sound in a language.  (It's possible to go on at great length about the
meaning of the phrase "distinctive sound."  For now, let's just say it's a
sound that speakers of a given language agree is the same sound, even
though, if instruments were to analyze the specifics, it might be different
for different speakers or vary depending on surrounding sounds.  English
speakers agree that the <t> in "stuck" and in "tuck" and in "pats" is the
same sound, and they also agree it's a different sound from the <d>, say,
in "duck" and "pads.")  Ideally it's a one-to-one match, that is, one
symbol represents only one distinctive sound, and any such individual sound
is represented by only one symbol.  But it often doesn't work out quite
that way.  Klingon, as luck would have it, is a good example of this.  The
romanization system commonly used for Klingon is a phonemic one in that
each distinctive sound of the language has a unique written representation.
Thus, the sound <j> is always written with a "j" and the letter "j" always
represents the sound <j> (as in <jej> "be sharp").  But in three cases, two
(Roman) letters represent a single sound ("ch," "gh," "ng") and in a
fourth, three letters are used ("tlh").  It didn't have to be this way. 
For example, rather than using "c" plus "h" for the sound at the beginning
and end of <chach> "emergency," using "c" alone could have sufficed ("c"
would be described as a letter representing the sound at the beginning and
end of the word for "emergency"); "emergency" would then be romanized as
<cac>.  Anyway, if we look upon these four combinations ("ch," "gh," "ng,"
"tlh") as if they were four individual symbols (as opposed to combinations
of six Roman alphabet letters), then the Klingon romanization system can be
said to be phonemic.

(There's a good reason that "ch," rather than "c" alone, was chosen for
that sound in the romanized version of Klingon; likewise "tlh" rather than,
say "L," and so on.  But that gets us off the subject.)

So the Klingon romanization system is a phonemic system, but what about
<pIqaD>?  How, exactly, does <pIqaD> work?  I'm not sure.  Mike Okuda (who
puts the characters on various control panels and other displays for the
various Star Trek series and movies) and I have discussed it.  We're pretty
sure it's not an alphabet (and it's therefore not phonemic in the way the
romanized version is), but we don't know the details.  Prodding of Maltz is
definitely in order here.

There is no problem with <pIqaD> being used for the various dialects,
regardless of how it works, because it does not necessarily work the same
way (or, better, the details are not necessarily the same) for all of the
dialects.  Since the system has been around for a long time (if Kahless
was literate, he was literate in <pIqaD>), it could provide some insights
into earlier stages of the language. The rules for mapping the old
pronunciations represented by the <pIqaD> writing conventions onto the new
pronunciations surely differ for the different dialects, but the rules --
with varying degrees of complexity, to be sure -- certainly work. 

I agree with SuStel.  Once we know the details of <pIqaD>, I'm sure we'll
find it a more interesting system than the romanization system we're all
used to.  

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