Funny Symbols Saul Epstein Mon, 6 Jul 1998 14:42:53 -0500 Quotes from: Randall Raemon Date: Monday, July 06, 1998 11:49 AM >In message >"Saul Epstein" writes: > >> The transcription here is entirely lower-case for now, though for >> slightly different reasons than in the case of Klingon. Rather than >> employ upper-case letters to express special sound distinctions, VALD >> has adapted some letters from the International Phonetic Alphabet >> which have no upper-case counterparts. In the future, we will either >> devise some upper-case forms for these, or switch to an actual Vulcan >> script. > >Let me ask a somewhat unrelated question, probably reflecting my >lack of linguistics education: why do letter case differences (need >to) exist? Is it the circumstance of working within the confines >of an alphabet, as opposed to a more pictorical form of language >representation? The, um, pictoriality of the representation doesn't really matter, but otherwise I think you have it. A language has a finite number of idealized sounds which it recognizes as distinct, and an alphabet or a syllabary has to adequately represent these idealized sounds distinctly as well. Languages that use the Latin alphabet get by, with varying degrees of success, by using single signs to represent multiple sounds, mostly according to rules, which are mostly phonological. As an example: The letter G, in English, can represent a "hard G," as in "rig;" a "soft G," as in "Rigel;" and it can act, with N, to represent a velar nasal, as in "ring." Fluent English speakers can usually produce the proper pronunciation of a word containing G, even without having heard the word before, because they know the rules. (Though, of course, all the rules have infamous exceptions. "Wrought" and "rough" and "through" come to mind. I don't think those are governed by rules but by fossilized historical choices...) Anyway, insofar as these things are governed by rules, the rules are essentially "made up" by each language. Though not completely random, they aren't... inevitable, I guess. Sometimes, even outside "technical" discussions, efforts are made to expand the set of signs available and to make each one less flexible. The purpose is to prevent people from mis-applying familiar rules when intepreting the representation of a language with different rules by making the system of representation more precise and less than immediately familiar-seeming. Klingon does this by making use of capital letters. There are two distinct H-like sounds in Klingon whose difference is important. One is written and the other is written . Almost all the upper- and lower-case letters are used to represent such necessary disctinctions, so that writing out Klingon in "all caps" would be a lot like substituting letters from the first half of the alphabet for any letters from the second half. Imagine writing the word "Vulcan" as , and just having to "know" that this represents /v/, this represents /u/, the first represents /a/, but the second represents /n/. ZC presents similar difficulties. The original transcription and my own deal with them by careful distribution of the available signs, and reluctant use of some double-signs (like ). Clear enough? Too clear? -- from Saul Epstein locus*planetkc,com - www,planetkc,com/locus "Surak ow'phaaper thes'hi thes'tca'; thes'phaadjar thes'hi suraketca'." -- K'dvarin Urswhl'at