Global Moxie

Photo by Will Bragg.

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 Turns out that I'm a few years out of date.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.

A sample of pIqaD, the Klingon alphabet.

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.