pIqaD Playground
Type/paste Klingon text below. You may use Okrandian transcription and xifan hol. I recommend putting spaces arround . and , – this is the way they were first written on the SkyBox cards.[1]
pIqaD conversion is performed automatically by the font used.[2]
Xifan hol
Xifan hol uses the full English alphabet (a–z), it does not rely on
capitalization, and each sound is written using just one character. This means
that single letters are used instead of the digraphs ch, gh, and ng and
the trigraph tlh, that lower case letters are used instead of D, H, I,
Q and S, that q/Q are written as k/q respectively, and that the
apostrophe (’) may be written using z. In regards to digits (0–9) and
punctuation marks ,;: and .!? there’s no difference between xifan hol and
Okrandian transcription.
The following table illustrates the differences between the Okrandian transcription and xifan hol:
| Xifan hol | c | g | f | k | q | x | z | d | h | i | s
| |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Okrandian | ch | gh | ng | q | Q | tlh | ’ | D | H | I | S |
Pros: Xifan hol is eminently suitable for user input, especially where typing speed is limited, such as on-screen keyboards (it is used, for example, by the app boQwI’). Since there is a one-to-one correspondence between glyphs of xifan hol and pIqaD, xifan hol was used by all early pIqaD fonts (up until Unicode became widely adopted).
Cons: Since we klingonists have all taught ourselves to read Klingon using the Okrandian transcription system, xifan hol is less suited for tasks where speed of comprehension is important (e.g. when reading or proofreading).
Footnotes
- These punctuation marks appeared on the SkyBox trading cards SP1, SP2 and SP3 (1994), on S7 and S9 and S13 and S15 (1995) and again then on S19, S20 and S21 (1996) separated from the surrounding text by spaces. There were also two cards, S8 and S14 (1995), which did not separate punctuation marks and text with space. Since then the punctuation marks have not appeared again.
- This page uses the font KApIqaDRoman, based on pIqaDRoman v4.0 (created by David J. Peterson and Chris Lipscombe – see also Chris’s page on pIqaD Writing). KApIqaDRoman differs from its predecessor in that a punctuation bug (. and , were swapped) has been fixed, and that the space was widened by 50% to make it more clearly discernible. (KApIqaDRoman is available in Truetype, WOFF and Fontforge formats.)