tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Nov 14 11:50:28 1995
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Re: Q
- From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Q
- Date: Tue, 14 Nov 1995 14:50:25 -0500
- In-reply-to: <[email protected]> (messagefrom Jeremy Cowan on Tue, 14 Nov 1995 07:33:25 -0800)
>Date: Tue, 14 Nov 1995 07:33:25 -0800
>From: Jeremy Cowan <[email protected]>
>On Mon, 13 Nov 1995, Christian Matzke wrote:
>> On 13 Nov 95 at 5:17, Elizabeth C. Hoyt <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > Which reminds me: has anyone ever wondered about the *names* of the
>> > letters in the Klingon alphabet, rather than the sounds they symbolize?
>>
>> I had toyed with using the first noun that appears in TKD under each
>> Klingon letter.
>The first noun isn't always the best. I'd go with more common nouns such
>as be' and chor. Or maybe, to keep confusion down, words that are
>unlikely to be used in conversation. However, Tengwar is the only
>alphabet that I've ever noticed to name the letters after specific objects.
It actually was the way alphabets started being named. The earliest
alphabets (most believe) were the Semitic/Phoenician ones. And they
started as pictograms that eventually came to represent their initial
sounds. The names of the Hebrew letters still reflect those early
meanings:
'aleph ox, (or leader.)
bet house
gimel camel
dalet door
heh ?
vav hook
zayin weapon
chet ?
Tet goat
yod hand
kaph palm of hand
lamed goad(?)
mem water
nun fish
samech fulcrum
`ayin eye
peh mouth
tzadi ?
qof monkey
resh head
shin tooth
tav mark
These names were carried over to Greek, who learned letters from the
Phoenicians. The words didn't mean anything to the Greeks, but they kept
the names (alpha, beta, gamma, delta...). It was later, when the Etruscans
learned the alphabet, that they decided to name vowels as the sound the
vowel makes, stops as stop+"e", and continuants as the continuant (so it
was a be ce de e fff zzz hhh i ka lll mmm nnn, etc). The continuants
eventually developed "e" before them, as people had trouble saying just a
continuant, c and k and q had their own history (note that above it's "ka"
and not "ke"; that's because c was "ce" and q was "qu"), and h also did
some weird things.
>> That is until I remembered that no Klingon words start with vowels
>Remeber one thing: the letters would still be written as solitary
>letters. You are just looking for a way to represent the letters in
>spoken language. If it were up to me (which it's not even close), I
>would use the following:
>bI chI DI ghI HI jI lI mI nI ngI pI qI QI rI SI tI tlhI vI
>wI yI 'Iy' 'a 'e 'I 'o 'u
It's possible, though perhaps they would also have drawn the distinction
between stops and continuants, etc... And maybe they would put "'" in
medial position (that's how "h" happened; the language lost its h/H sound,
and so people could really say "hhh". So they worked as hard as they could
to get a phonetic environment that let them get close. So they started
saying things like "aha" "aHa", "akka", etc. So "h" became "acca" which
became "aitch" in the same way that Latin "vacca" became "vache" in
French.
>I used "I" with all the consonants because, if I remember correctly from
>the scrabble frequencies, it is the most often used vowel.
>I wonder how the American Indians that Okrand has studied do the alphabet
>and if that would influence an alphabet that he might provide us.
Most Native American cultures don't have a native writing system. I think
some Inuits do. The famous case of Cherokee is a syllabary, and presumably
each graph is named by its syllable.
~mark