Difference between Klingon and Tengwar

[Mark Davis ☕️]

> As I already noted, this imagined issue of "dignity" is offensive beyond
belief from a group that's supposedly culturally neutral.

Let's be very clear. This is an open list where most of the people on the
list are simply expressing their opinions. These opinions are too often
pure speculation that simply builds on other speculation voiced on this
list. With little or no factual foundation.

This "dignity" explanation is of that sort. I was around during the
discussions, and there was never any mention of "dignity" as being a
factor. The principal reason for not progressing Klingon was in fact IP
complications.

And those are still a barrier: there is no point in even starting to
consider the Klingon script unless and until the IP problem is completely
resolved.

Mark


On Wed, Sep 15, 2021 at 1:43 PM Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode <
unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:

> On 9/15/21 3:17 PM, Doug Ewell via Unicode wrote:
>
> It seems fairly clear by now that the real blocking issue is the perception, or reaction to it, that encoding Klingon would be undignified to Unicode.
>
> And Asmus adds:
>
> Well, I didn't know that Unicode had "being high-brow" among its
> principles.
>
> Indeed.  As I already noted, this imagined issue of "dignity" is offensive
> beyond belief from a group that's supposedly culturally neutral.  If you
> took the sentence "encoding Klingon would be undignified to Unicode" and
> replaced "Klingon" with, say "Adlam" or "Yezidi" or "Mandombe", would
> anyone hesitate to call that bigoted and unworthy of Unicode?  "We
> shouldn't encode X languages because only Y people speak them and we don't
> want to be associated with them."  Would it be okay to replace X="African"
> and Y="dark-skinned"?  Then how is it okay to have X="Star Trek" and
> Y="geeks"?  Would you let some people's disapproval of Yezidis stop you
> from encoding Yezidi?  Then why do you care about people's disapproval of
> Klingon-speakers?
>
> This horse is dead, and I need to stop beating it.  But so long as this
> somehow is actually allowed to remain an issue, there's something very
> seriously wrong with how decisions are made.
>
> Is Klingon literature not high-brow enough?  How much research was done to
> make that decision, how much did the Unicode representatives read, and of
> what?  And how much research did they do to confirm the worthiness of Mro?
>
> ~mark
>
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