On Saturday, Oct 18, 2003, at 02:04 Australia/Melbourne, Nick Nicholas 
wrote:

On Saturday, Oct 18, 2003, at 00:31 Australia/Melbourne, Ecartis wrote:

> Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 11:00:45 +0100
> From: Jill Ramonsky <Jill.Ramonsky <at> aculab.com>
> Subject: Klingons and their allies - Beyond 17 planes
>
>
> The reason that the Klingon alphabet is not currently part of Unicode 
> is
> that the Klingon Language Institute submitted a proposal for the 
> Klingon
> script to the Unicode Consortium, and the Unicode consortium rejected
> it. I have been unable to fathom their reasons.

The relevant debates are linked on my page at 
http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/Klingon/piqad.html . And it's quite 
obvious what the real reasons were: the feeling that Klingon would 
bring Unicode into disrepute. (How many newspaper and web articles on 
Unicode in the late '90s included the phrase "even Klingon"?) And my 
impression was that feeling was even stronger in the ISO than the UTC. 
But hey, I wasn't there...

> [I should stress at this point the Klingon script /is/ used by the
> peoples of the Earth, right here in the 21st century]. Here's what the
> Klingon Language Institute has to say:

I think the KLI's summary is fair. (After all, I contributed to it. 

> Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 07:43:49 -0400
> Subject: Re: Klingons and their allies - Beyond 17 planes
> From: John Cowan <cowan <at> mercury.ccil.org>
>
> Jill Ramonsky scripsit:
>
>> It seems a simple enough case to argue - EITHER the 0x110000 character
>> space is amply big enough for everyone, as John Cowan asserts.
>
> Big enough for everyone, but not for everything.  Encoding Klingon has
> a cost beyond the allocation of codepoints:  proposals must be written
> (taking time away from other proposals that need to be written), 
> committees
> must deliberate, facts must be checked.  Most of that work had already
> been done for Klingon, as it's a dirt-simple script, much more so than
> Latin, to say nothing of Hebrew.  But it's a precedent.

Not a compelling one, though, and Michael in his time has repudiated 
it: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/unicode/message/11541 .

>>    The fact is that Klingon language publications,
>>    by and large, use the Romanized transcription presented in The
>>    Klingon Dictionary. This is arguably a chicken-and-egg situation,
>>    but nobody argued that point successfully to the relevant Unicode
>>    committees. /
>
> I don't think for a moment it's a chicken-and-egg situation.

I'm with Mark on this one, John: if it were official, you would see 
more pIqaD online. By no means most Klingon, but I do think more.

> Klingon
> is written in the Latin script in essentially all running-text (as 
> opposed
> to decorative) instances of its use.  If it were c-and-e, the script 
> could
> still be written by hand -- though it must have the worst ductus of any
> script ever devised, and would probably be writable only with the
> assistance of a set of rubber stamps.

Or by proprietary font (which has happened, as you will find by 
searching for XIFAN online, but not much), or by the PUA.

> Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 13:36:39 +0100
> From: Jill Ramonsky <Jill.Ramonsky <at> aculab.com>
> Subject: RE: Klingons and their allies - Beyond 17 planes
>
> In that case, I would argue that, in order to provide a big enough
> character space for everything, IF twenty-one bits is not enough THEN 
> we
> should use more bits. Users of any script, regardless of whether it's
> Klingon or anything else, should always be able to get codepoints for
> their script. Nobody should ever need to "justify" its use to a
> committee. It should suffice to claim "At least two people use it, so 
> we
> want codepoints for it". Klingon, at least, /does/ now use space in the
> PUA, but of course that's a problem for anyone who doesn't agree on the
> particular choice of mapping.

John is right that this is a slippery slope; any two people can be 
boneheads. That said, I think the voting down of pIqaD was stuffy and 
pointless; like I say on my pIqaD site, "Personally, I do not regard 
pIqaD as more or less frivolous than Tengwar—or for that matter 
Meroitic" (since, as Bunz has often argued, specialists on ancient 
languages only ever work in transliteration, so the scholarly market 
won't use them all that much). But it's done, and both me and the KLI 
built ourselves a bridge and got over it. People on the KLI list did in 
fact comment at the time that the "semi-private" assignment of Klingon 
in the PUA (and there has been more than one font using that 
assignment) was a good outcome.

> Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 06:31:37 -0700
> From: Michael Everson <everson <at> evertype.com>
> Subject: Re: Klingons and their allies - Beyond 17 planes
>
> It was rejected because the people who read and write Klingon don't
> actually use the script. Thus:
>
>> The fact is that Klingon language publications, by and large, use
>> the Romanized transcription presented in The Klingon Dictionary.
>> This is arguably a chicken-and-egg situation, but nobody argued that
>> point successfully to the relevant Unicode committees.
>
> It is not a chicken-and-egg situation. Were the Klingon Dictionary
> reissued without Latin orthography, and were articles in HolQeD
> regularly written in Klingon script, one might well take notice. CSUR
> gives an encoding which can be used; we have yet to see it being used!

http://www.lojban.org/jbovlaste/natlang/listing.html?lang=i-klingon . 
Which is not even a Klingonist site. You overstate our case: the people 
who read and write Klingon *rarely* actually use the script. Yes, its 
most prominent venue is on the commemorative T-shirts at the KLI annual 
conventions, but it's not like noone there is able to nut out what they 
mean --- or design them in the first place. One might argue that 
T-shirts and Lojban online dictionary forms are not enough of a 
precedent for assigning a block; but I'm not sure how well pIqaD would 
compare in usage past or present to, say, the Elbasan script.

Ah well. Best get back to Classical Greek before we start seeing more 
well-considered and judicious posts like 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/unicode/message/5552 ...

--
κι έγειρε αργά τα στήθια τα θλιμμένα·#Nick Nicholas, French/Italian,
σαν αηδόνι που σε νυχτιά ανοιξιάτα   #University of Melbourne
την ώρα που κελάηδα επνίχτη, ωιμένα! #        nickn <at> unimelb.edu.au
στις μυρωδιές και στ' ανθισμένα βάτα.# http://www.opoudjis.net
-- Ν. Καζαντζάκης, Τερτσίνες: Χριστός#         

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