Wertyu

KLI pIqaD

The KLI pIqaD

KLI pIqaD text sample

Although the Latin alphabet is used by some enthusiasts to write Klingon, the speaking community also makes use of an artificial script designed to emulate Klingon writing on the show. This alphabet was created by an anonymous source at Paramount, who based their alphabet on letters seen in the show. This "source" sent in their alphabet to the Klingon Language Institute and the KLI uploaded it onto their website as the Klingons' way of writing their language. This alphabet has gained some acceptance within the speaker and fan community although many Klingonists still prefer the Latin alphabet.

The alphabet is quite simple: It contains twenty-six letters with a one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correspondence: that is, one letter represents one sound and one sound is written with one letter. There are also ten numerals in the set. It is written from left to right, top to bottom like English. There is no actual punctuation; however, those that use punctuation with the alphabet, use Skybox punctuation symbols (see below).

In September 1997, Michael Everson made a proposal for encoding this in Unicode.[2] The Unicode Technical Committee rejected the Klingon proposal in May 2001 on the grounds that research showed almost no use of the script for communication, and the vast majority of the people who did use Klingon employed the Latin alphabet by preference.[3] Everson created a mapping of pIqaD into the Private Use Area of Unicode, which he listed in the ConScript Unicode Registry (U+F8D0 to U+F8FF[4] [5]). Since then several fonts using that encoding have appeared, and software for typing in pIqaD has become available. As a result, blogs in pIqaD have begun to appear,[1] raising the possibility of reapplying for inclusion in Unicode when there is a sufficient corpus. Existing text in Romanization can easily be converted to pIqaD also.

Google provides Klingon content, but its web server currently doesn't recognize the...