I'm off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz!

[pne]

Well, not quite, but I'll be off to the qepHom (small meeting of fans of the Klingon language) in Saarbrücken; I'll be leaving tomorrow morning and returning on Sunday night.

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

I am not too sure how to do the singular imperative

In this case (you-none/him/her/it): yI-. (This is also used for YOU(plural)-him/her/it but not for YOU-none, which has pe-, as you used.)

My current conlang of choice is Sindarin.

Ah yes.

How "speakable" is Sindarin?

At one point, I was interested slightly in learning Quenya (as a more "classical" Tolklang), but I believe the corpus isn't large enough to have it be "speakable" in that you can talk about many subjects in it, but I believe Sindarin has a much larger known vocabulary.

(Lack of vocabulary is sometimes a problem in Klingon as well, especially for Earth concepts such as "car" or "bread".)

[jordik.livejournal.com]

How "speakable" is Sindarin?

Well, it is a quite complete language. Much as I have troubles with the Peter Jackson movies, one good thing about them is that they hired David Salo to reconstruct 'missing' Sindarin words: his assumptions are very valid, and have done much to make Sindarin more speakable.

Lack of vocabulary is sometimes a problem in Klingon as well, especially for Earth concepts such as "car" or "bread".

The major problem of course is that the known vocabulary is limited, but by using words from Tolkien's old Ñoldorin dictionary (the Ñoldorin language later became Sindarin, with an entirely different origin) adjusted for later changes, you can have conversations in it. But even basic concepts are missing in Sindarin, more so than in Klingon probably, because Klingon is a 'modern' language comparable to English, while Sindarin is perhaps better compared to Roman Latin or Old Greek.

Off-topic…

[jordik.livejournal.com]

By the way, little HTML-nitpick:

CITE is not for quotes or excerpts, but rather for sources of cited works. The actual quote or excerpt should be done with Q, or in longer cases with BLOCKQUOTE:

<q>It was the best of times; it was the worst of times,</q>
wrote Dickens in <cite>A Tale of Two Cities</cite>.

or:

<blockquote>And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!</blockquote>
— Galadriel, as written by J.R.R. Tolkien in <cite>The Lord of the Rings</cite>

This incorrect usage of CITE is the one thing about the new LJ phoneposts which most irks me.



You could also use the cite attribute instead of the tag, if the source is a valid URL:
<q cite="http://www.dickens.org/twocities">It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.</q>

or:

<blockquote cite="http://www.tolkien.org/lotr">And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!</blockquote>

<cite> and friends

[pne.livejournal.com]

Hm... *reads the spec (http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/text.html#h-9.2.1) again* I suppose you're right.

I picked up the habit from someone else to mark off quotations from others in LiveJournal comments; previously I had used <i>.

I suppose that <blockquote> is the best, perhaps, since I generally want to set off quotations from my comments. This'll probably mean that I should also use <p> around each paragraph rather than relying on the auto-formatting with <br> that LiveJournal would do otherwise (for "correctness", and also because I can imagine the spacing may be off if you simply end a </blockquote> and hit return twice in the comment box).

Hm, that would be invalid, wouldn't it? A <br> immediately following a </blockquote> without an intervening block-level container such as <p> or <div>?

Thanks for pointing that out.

Re: <cite> and friends

[jordik.livejournal.com]

A blockquote usually has automatic margins on top and bottom, so you should not need an <br> tag after it. Alas once you begin using block-level tags here on LJ you can't have valid markup unless you disable the automatic formatting.

Although LJ certainly is way up there when it comes to conformance, it wouldn't take much to make LJ validate fully. I'd love to see what is possible if I get the time ;-)

<q>

[pne.livejournal.com]

Any idea how well-supported <q> is by current browsers?

Re: <q>

[jordik.livejournal.com]

Modern browsers (read Opera, Mozilla/Gecko, Safari/KDE) will display as wanted: in-line, typically italic, and with generated quotes.

Legacy browsers (MSIE, Netscape 4) will not render it, so it is displayed in-line without required quotes and not otherwise marked.


So basically people using legacy browsers won't see anything, but you can get around it in a way by forcing italics with your page CSS (q {font-style: italic}). Alas since MSIE also fails to support generated content, there's no way to get the quotes working.
People ought to stop using legacy browsers anyway.

About the same problem as the missing support for ABBR in MSIE: you have to markup everything as ACRONYM (even if it isn't pronounceable), or fix it yourself with CSS.