Re: Some more idea about modern Vulcan writing Saul Epstein Wed, 19 Nov 1997 08:55:29 -0600 From: Rob Zook Date: Wednesday, November 19, 1997 7:27 AM >Hi all, > >I have noticed that some features of Vulcan grammer will turn up on >a regular basis in normal writing. I think some we should "iconize" >a couple of them, namely the logical particles and the interogative >particle. So instead of writing: > >qa kja'aj qa kjaniaj Uh-oh. This makes the third spelling of "being." ;-) >one might write: > >?kja| ?kja!| > >Where ?, |, and ! represent an interogative symbol, a logical or >symbol and a logical not symbol. That seems sensible. Then "Kirk and Spock" could be krrk& spok& >On the otherhand this form of writing could find use in the formally >logical use of Vulcan, and not in more colloqual or metaphoric uses. Maybe. They might be generally used, but with different interpretations. The inambiguous mode would be careful and explicit about the difference between "or" and "exclusive or," for instance, and would probably regard each negation in a sequence as negating the next inner negation... -(-a) = a. It might even have a way to indicate that a proposition's value is uncertain, to distinguish such things from others which, at least in a given argument, are known or assumed to be true. Actually, there's another distinction to make: given vs. proven. Our & sign, by the way, derives from a calligraphic representation of the Latin "et," meaning "and." And many of the ligatures (signs representing more than one letter) and diacritics (marks on or around letters) that show up in European languages got their start in the Middle Ages as abbreviations for common letter sequences. The tradition was probably killed off by the printing press, which prefers a smaller set of distinct characters. -- from Saul Epstein liberty*uit,net http://www,johnco,cc,ks,us/~sepstein "Surak ow'phaaper thes'hi thes'tca'; thes'phaadjar thes'hi suraketca'." -- K'dvarin Urswhl'at