The (Klingon) Empire Strikes Back

[Mark Shoulson]

At the time of writing this letter it has not yet hit the UTC Document 
Register, but I have recently submitted a document revisiting the 
ever-popular issue of the encoding of Klingon "pIqaD".  The reason 
always given why it could not be encoded was that it did not enjoy 
enough usage, and so I've collected a bunch of examples to demonstrate 
that this is not true (scans and also web pages, etc.)  So the issue 
comes back up, and time to talk about it again.

Michael Everson: I basically copied your 1997 proposal into the 
document, with some minor changes.  I hope you don't mind.  And if you 
don't want to be on the hook for providing the glyphs to UTC, I can do 
that.  I think that proposal should serve as a starting-point for 
discussion anyway.  There are some things that maybe should be different:

1. the "SYMBOL FOR EMPIRE" also known as the "MUMMIFICATION GLYPH".  I 
don't know where the second name comes from, I don't know how important 
it is to encode it, and I don't know how much of a trademark headache it 
will cause with Paramount, as it is used pretty heavily in their 
imagery.  Something we'll have to talk about.

2. I put in the COMMA and FULL STOP, which were not in the original 
proposal but were in the ConScript registry entry.  The examples I have 
show them clearly being used.  UTC may decide to unify them with 
existing triangular shapes, which may or may not be a good idea.

3. For my part, I've invented a pair of ampersands for Klingon (Klingon 
has two words for "and": one for joining verbs/sentences and one for 
joining nouns (the former goes between its "conjunctands", the latter 
after them)), from ligatures of the letters in question.  The pretty 
much have NO usage, of course (and are not in the proposal), but maybe 
they should be presented to the community.

Document is available at http://web.meson.org/downloads/pIqaDReturns.pdf

Let the bickering begin!

~mark

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20161103/955d6012/attachment.html>