Klingon vs. Ogham

[b***@gael-image.com]

It strikes me that number of users alone should not be cause to exclude a
script. I'm certain that many of you are familar with Michael Krauss'
landmark essay, "The World's Languages in Crisis" (1992), which estimates
that as many as half of the world's languages are spoken by fewer than
10,000 people each.

How many users of Ogham are there? (An bhfuil foilseachán ar bith sa lá atá
inniú ann clóbhuailte in Ogham?) Is there even one publication today that is
printed in Ogham? Why does Ogham qualify for entry but not Klingon?

It strikes me that the controversy about Klingon has more to do with it's
fictional origins than number of users.

Is this not true?

But it does NOT, under any circumstances, belong in Unicode proper. It
has ONE USER that I am aware of, in all of history -- the one writing
this message -- plus two other one-time users who have sent me e-mails
in it. That does NOT justify adding it, along with all the other "pet
fish" symbols and TAFKAP glyphs and things other high school kids have
dreamed up, to a character encoding standard that will be implemented
and used worldwide.

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[Michael Everson]

Post by b***@gael-image.com
How many users of Ogham are there? (An bhfuil foilseachán ar bith sa lá atá
inniú ann clóbhuailte in Ogham?)

Tá foilseacháin ina bhfuil Ogham clóchuailte ann.

Post by b***@gael-image.com
Is there even one publication today that is
printed in Ogham? Why does Ogham qualify for entry but not Klingon?

It is an authentic script used to write Primitive
Irish on stone, and later varieties of Irish in
manuscripts from the middle ages to the 19th
century. The texts and script are studied in
their own right.

Post by b***@gael-image.com
It strikes me that the controversy about Klingon
has more to do with its fictional origins than
number of users. Is this not true?

I don't think so. We will certainly encode
Tengwar and Cirth, which have corpora of
documents in them. Klingonists universally prefer
Latin, and it was the judgement of the UTC that
the usage criteria hadn't been met.
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com


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[Michael Everson]

And of course, there's all that discussion on Tolkien languages
online... all of which used Latin transliteration (with slightly
varying standards too: accented vowels, doubled vowels, tripled
sometimes, etc etc. "More than one orthography"). This gets back
to "everything's a code of Latin" again.

Tengwar is easily as complex as Tamil.
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com


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[Mark E. Shoulson]

Post by b***@gael-image.com
It strikes me that the controversy about Klingon has more to do with
its fictional origins than number of users. Is this not true?

I don't think so. We will certainly encode Tengwar and Cirth, which
have corpora of documents in them. Klingonists universally prefer
Latin, and it was the judgement of the UTC that the usage criteria
hadn't been met.

And of course, there's all that discussion on Tolkien languages
online... all of which used Latin transliteration (with slightly varying
standards too: accented vowels, doubled vowels, tripled sometimes, etc
etc. "More than one orthography"). This gets back to "everything's a
code of Latin" again.

~mark

P.S. Make no mistake. To the extent that there are "degrees" of this,
while I think Klingon should get encoded, I certainly think tengwar and
cirth et al deserve to be encoded "more" than Klingon does.



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[John Hudson]

And of course, there's all that discussion on Tolkien languages online...
all of which used Latin transliteration (with slightly varying standards
too: accented vowels, doubled vowels, tripled sometimes, etc etc. "More
than one orthography"). This gets back to "everything's a code of Latin"
again.

It is possible to write Sanskrit in the Latin script, but that does not
mean that ASCII is a sufficient encoding for Devanagari.

John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC ***@tiro.com

I sometimes think that good readers are as singular,
and as awesome, as great authors themselves.
- JL Borges



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[Mark E. Shoulson]

Post by John Hudson

And of course, there's all that discussion on Tolkien languages
online... all of which used Latin transliteration (with slightly
varying standards too: accented vowels, doubled vowels, tripled
sometimes, etc etc. "More than one orthography"). This gets back to
"everything's a code of Latin" again.

It is possible to write Sanskrit in the Latin script, but that does
not mean that ASCII is a sufficient encoding for Devanagari.

My point exactly.

~mark



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[Michael Everson]

The example of Shavian might eventually be precedent for Klingon to
be encoded, but for the present one web page on the KLI's own web
site does not seem to me to be sufficient evidence to meet the usage
requirements. Press on, Mark.
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com


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[Mark E. Shoulson]

The example of Shavian might eventually be precedent for Klingon to be
encoded, but for the present one web page on the KLI's own web site
does not seem to me to be sufficient evidence to meet the usage
requirements. Press on, Mark.

I plan to. I've been collecting evidence of folks keeping journals and
exchanging letters and such in pIqaD, and Lawrence Schoen has mentioned
that if we have a little more metalinguistic vocabulary in Klingon we
may see short articles in our journal (HolQeD) in pIqaD.

Meanwhile, Shavian is nice and all, but I really have to get you a
proper proposal for Bell's Visible Speech. What you have in CSUR is
incomplete, since it doesn't contain Henry Sweet's additions. And
Visible Speech actually has some usage, and belongs in Plane 1.

~mark



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[Philippe Verdy]

Post by b***@gael-image.com
It strikes me that the controversy about Klingon has more to do with
its fictional origins than number of users. Is this not true?

I don't think so. We will certainly encode Tengwar and Cirth, which
have corpora of documents in them. Klingonists universally prefer
Latin, and it was the judgement of the UTC that the usage criteria
hadn't been met.

And of course, there's all that discussion on Tolkien languages
online... all of which used Latin transliteration (with slightly varying
standards too: accented vowels, doubled vowels, tripled sometimes, etc
etc. "More than one orthography"). This gets back to "everything's a
code of Latin" again.

I do agree there: transliterations are used mostly because of existing
technical constraints and costs with old technologies. Look for example
about the debate related to berber, which is most often transliterated
to Latin, but with lots of problem notably for its orthograph or predictable
encoding, and which even causes problems to readers as it just appears
as an incompatible set of conventions.



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[John Hudson]

Post by b***@gael-image.com
How many users of Ogham are there? (An bhfuil foilseachán ar bith sa lá atá
inniú ann clóbhuailte in Ogham?) Is there even one publication today that is
printed in Ogham? Why does Ogham qualify for entry but not Klingon?
It strikes me that the controversy about Klingon has more to do with it's
fictional origins than number of users.

My understanding is that the decisive argument against encoding Klingon was
that the Klingon user community *do not use the script* and no one from
that community has actively sought to have the script encoded. Every
Klingon publication I've seen has been written in Latin transliteration,
not in the Klingon script.

The fact that Klingon is fictional is neither here nor there: the Tolkien
scripts are fictional, but there is an active effort to get them encoded by
people who have studied them and want to produce documents in them, i.e. by
a user community.

Ogham inscriptions are the subject of academic study by a user community
who want to produce documents that include Ogham text. I know this for a
fact because I've made fonts for them.

John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC ***@tiro.com

I sometimes think that good readers are as singular,
and as awesome, as great authors themselves.
- JL Borges



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[John Cowan]

Post by b***@gael-image.com
How many users of Ogham are there? (An bhfuil foilseachán ar bith sa lá atá
inniú ann clóbhuailte in Ogham?) Is there even one publication today that is
printed in Ogham? Why does Ogham qualify for entry but not Klingon?

Because Klingon is neither an archaic nor a current-use script.
--
I don't know half of you half as well John Cowan
as I should like, and I like less than half ***@reutershealth.com
of you half as well as you deserve. http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
--Bilbo http://www.reutershealth.com


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