Blocky Vulcan Writing Rob Zook Fri, 18 Sep 1998 13:48:53 -0500 Hi all, My thanks to Steven Boozer for pointing out the blocky writing on the ST:TMP Vulcan shuttle which Spock used to catch up to the Enterprise. The pictures in the Encyclopedia were clear enough for me to get a good look at the letters. They are very sharply delinated very clear letters. An excellant choice I think for a "Media" version of Vulcan lettering, for all it's lack of any resemblance to earlier writing styles. As I may have mentioned earlier, it's clear from an examination of that picture that only 6 individual letters appear. Five of the six biggest letters are repeated in a smaller form, then a small series of the six twice, but the second six rotated 180 degrees clockwise. The name of the shuttle is supposed to be the Surak. I propose that we interprete it as a sort of syllabic writing style, which I think would work in a manner similar to Tolien's Tengwar. A letter by itself, means just a consonant sound, by adding a little mark, like [,-' .] we can add a vowel following the consonant. Say a blocky letter with a , below it would mean a +u. An a blocky letter with a - above it could mean a +a. So we could interprate the use of the writing like this: http://home,unicom,net/~lalaith/startrek/vulcan/vulc_lang/vulcblocks,jpg The remaining four letters could be used to create a word meaning the Vulcan equivalent to: "U,S,S", or "Shuttle", or "small space vessel". I don't know what dialect such a word would come from, could be the modern tongue, could be OHV, or it could be from a tongue spoken around ShiKahr (Spock's likely departure point). Mark, can you tell us the OHV word(s) for "shuttle" and "small space vessel"? Rob Z.