Klingon Punctuation Marks

With Special Thanks to
Nick Nicholas.
(For telling me about the
existence of pIqaD punctuation.)  

The Klingon alphabet, pIqaD, as we all know it, contains letters suitable for writing tlhIngan Hol, and look like this:  

a	b	ch	D	e	gh	H	I	j
l	m	n	ng	o	p	q	Q	r
S	t	tlh	u	v	w	y	'

There is also a set of Klingon numbers, which look like this: (Klingons earlier used a ternary number system [base three] but the Empire adopted a decimal system some time back.)  

pagh	wa'	cha'	wej	loS	vagh	jav	Soch	chorgh	Hut
0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9

On the matter of punctuation marks, the issue get a bit more complicated. In The Klingon Dictionary Marc Okrand does not use punctuation at all when writing Klingon. But later on this changes in The Klingon Way, where he makes frequent use of ".", "!", "?", "," and ";".

Not all that long ago I received a letter from Nick Nicholas

pIqaD punctuation exists, and is featured on the Klingon trading cards with Okrandian canon text: an upturned filled triangle, and its upside down counterpart. There is no correlation between pIqaD translation and the romanized gloss or English gloss punctuation that I could discern; it seems reasonable to treat the upturned version as a full stop (period), and the downturned version as a semicolon or comma. (cf. Greek punctuation: lower stop = full stop; upper stop = semicolon.)

I mean, the downturned version as comma. Oh, and there's nothing complex about Greek punctuation, contra to what you now say on your web page :-) ; simple, upper stop in Greek corresponds to the Roman semi-colon. (For that matter, middle stop --- used for Ancient but not Modern texts --- corresponds to colon; indeed, middle stop and upper stop are usually not distinguished.) I just speculated that, if Klingon had two punctuation symbols, one would be a full stop, and the other would cover both semicolon and colon.