I’ve been reading lately through Klingon grammar, and the orthography of the language is my only dissatisfaction with it so far. I understand that the mixed-case alphabet reminds actors that “this sound is not like English!” but its disadvantages are multiple:
1. It’s ugly.
2. There is ambiguity between capital I and lowercase l in many typefaces (such that Wikipedia, for example, has to resort to clunky textboxes). Admittedly, all potentially ambiguous cases can be clarified by the language’s phonotactics, but why should we have to fall back on phonotactics when the distinction could be more transparent in orthography?
3. It’s inconsistent. There are di-/trigraphs like ch and tlh, but other sounds also not straightforwardly written in Latin letters are transcribed with capitals: H, Q for example. These could just as easily be written as digraphs.
4. Some capitals are completely unnecessary if there is no lowercase from which they disambiguate. For example, there is a capital I, but no lowercase i.
5. The language can be difficult to write on platforms where auto-capitalization might be in effect.
So what would I change? Eliminate the capital letters, since they are the cause of most of my complaints. Where a capital does not contrast with a lowercase, then the lowercase can be used instead. Thus D I can be replaced with d i.
Likewise, H and S can be replaced by far more intuitive digraphs: kh and sh. The former should be read as /x/ by most readers of fantasy and science fiction.
Now what to do with Q? It cannot be rewritten as q, since that letter already represents the uvular plosive. Since Q represents an uvular affricate, I will rewrite it as qh, similar to ch gh sh tlh, which are also affricate or fricative.
Everything else remains, including ‘ for the glottal stop, since I think it should be relatively familiar as such from Hawaiian and romanizations of Arabic.
In summary:
b ch D gh H j l m n ng p q Q r S t tlh v w y ‘
becomes
b ch d gh kh j l m n ng p q qh r sh t tlh v w y
a e I o u
becomes
a e i o u
How does this look in practice? Let’s take the sentence ‘four thousand throats may be cut in one night by a running man’ in the original orthography:
qaStaHvIS wa’ ram loS SaD Hugh SijlaH qetbogh loD
And in my revision:
qashtakhvish wa’ ram losh shad khugh shijlakh qetbogh lod
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