Re: Vulcan Writing Analysis
Mark Gardner 
Sun, 06 Sep 1998 18:17:03 -0700


I think that Rob Zook has done some exciting work with the subject of
Vulcan writing and characters!  Our group decided  years ago to "take a
pass" indefinitely on the issue of Vulcan characters or pictographs, since
we planned to focus on the "latinized" or transliterated version of the
language for ease of research, writing, reading, display and printing.
Eventually we hoped to return to this issue when we produced more detailed
language lessons.  I did create an entire Vulcan alphabet in the "Media
Script", a simplified style based on the characters seen on the ceremonial
robes, back in 1985 on my old Commodore 64 computer.  If type creation
programs did not cost so much, I would have probably done several Vulcan
alphabets in TrueType format by now.

We did think that the symbols on the robes of Sarek and Spock are probably
an ancient way of spelling out something like "House of Surak" or even
perhaps "The Third Line of the First House of Surak" (count the "pips")!
It is possible that the "pips" are diacritical marks, but we think that
they are either numbers or "vowel" marks with the larger characters being
"consonants" or abbreviated words.  It is possible it just spells "Surak",
being a representation of his signet.  I have always been fascinated with
the way the Ancient Egyptians put important names in a cartouche and used
it as a personal seal.  Perhaps this is a Vulcan counterpart to that kind
of practice.  I don't know.  We agree that the Vulcan we've been exposed to
in the media started out as a pictographic language, when you see how
ornate their symbols are.  Since Vulcan obviously had/has other languages
from a number of linguistic family trees, it is likely that they have had
many examples of writing using cuneiform, rune, alphabetic, pictographic,
phonetic, etc., over the millennia.  The writing that Rob showed could be
two different things completely and maybe you can't correlate the "staff
writing" with the "calligraphic writing".

I think this is a tremendously "fascinating" line of research and I think
we should study it seriously.  This is the type of research that is
rewarding mentally, as well as being "fun"!

Mark R. Gardner
Vulcan Language Institute