Klingon friends, Elvish colleagues, I must apologize. I really thought that you could use Big Medium to create websites in your native tongues. Alas, it appears that I was sadly mistaken.
In order to allow you to create a website in any language, Big Medium, like any self-respecting content management system, supports unicode text encoding. Unicode is a technical standard for a kind of universal alphabet encompassing almost all characters and writing systems in the world from Mongolian to Cherokee to Bengali. It can even handle ancient scripts like cuneiform and Phoenician.
So, if you want to have a site to communicate with ancient Assyrians, no problem, Big Medium has you covered.
I thought that I was solid with Klingons and Elves, too. Turns out that I'm a few years out of date.
In the late '90s, Klingon inclusion in the unicode standard looked to be on the fast track. Linguist and font designer Michael Everson submitted it to the Unicode Consortium for consideration in 1997. But in 2001, the consortium rejected the proposal.
Interestingly enough, this was not because of any technical deficiencies (like, y'know, how it's a fictional language) but rather because everyone who communicated in Klingon (don't ask) apparently used the western Latin alphabet. So, the consortium figured, no need to make Klingon characters part of the standard, when the letters A to z work just fine, thanks.
But friends, breathe easy, that may yet change. At least a handful of Klingon traditionalists have begun using the Klingon alphabet ("pIqaD") in their blogs with the help of special font packs and a customization of the private swath of the unicode standard. With bonafide Klingon script in the wild, there's talk again of submitting Klingon to the unicode consortium.
I must confess that while I'm fluent in JavaScript, I don't know Klingon, so I can't shed much light on exactly what these Klingon blogs say. Wikipedia opines, however, that the language is somewhat constrained by its vocabulary:
A small number of people, mostly dedicated Star Trek fans or language aficionados, can converse in Klingon. However, its vocabulary, heavily centered around Star Trek or 'Klingon' concepts such as "spacecraft" or "warfare", makes it impractical for everyday use.
And what of our Elvish brothers? Well, still no dice for them either, but there's hope in Rivendell and Valinor. The Elvish scripts Tengwar and Cirth have been under consideration for inclusion in the unicode standard since 2003.
It would seem, for now at least, that Big Medium's language support must remain merely cosmopolitan and not intergalactic.
This week's tunes
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This was written in 2006 but I've never thought time mattered as much as existence on the Internet.
It's July 28 and I've started a project to develop a logo-phonetic writing system for Klingon that, unlike the above font by Okuda, isn't based on the Phoenician alphabet. Whether or not it makes it into Unicode is irrelevant. What's important in these matters is that it arrives at wide-spread distribution level, like a website or a published book.
Hey, I just heard that the Klingon Language Movie, "earthlings: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water", is finally available on line. Check it out
earthlings-movie.com
I saw this at a Con last year, it is hilarious and really wierd.
TD
You should be aware that Klingon pIqaD and Tolkien Tengwar and Cirth scripts have semi-standard mappings into the Private Use Area of Unicode, and that there are fonts and keyboard layouts for them for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Some of us are working to get them into standard Linux distributions, and to re-raise the question of adding them officially to Unicode. See, for example, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Thlingan_Hol
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.--George Bernard Shaw
This is kind of a chicken vs. egg issue. Were the users of other languages with non-Unicode scripts not also forced to use Unicode transliterations of their language in order to communicate on the internet? I learned to speak Klingon on the Internet, with no possibility of using pIqaD (the rejected script) so of course I only learned the transcription. Now that the technology has advanced such that it's possible to use Klingon, it makes sense to allow future learners the opportunity to do it in pIqaD. I'm sure more people would use Klingon than ancient Phoenician.
tehe what?
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