tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon May 13 17:41:17 1996

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double consonants

I agree with macheq on most of the double consonants. I am NOT
surprised at ~mark's (described) pronunciation of words like
"bookkeeper", because that's the usual English pronunciation of a double
stop. We DO have them, ~mark, but normally only where two words or
morphemes* come together with the same consonant. We have the word
"book" and the word "keeper", and we still recognize them when we say
"bookkeeper" even though the meaning is rather specialized, so we
pronounce them both, and just as you described it. For stops (p b t D q '),
prolong the hold between stopping up the breath and releasing it; for
continuants (v S H gh m n ng w l r y), make the sound about twice as
long.

(*morpheme -- roughly, a meaningful piece of a word, like "rough" and
"ly" in "roughly". A word can contain just one morpheme, and in English
often does.)

But I disagree with macheq -- since there's no canonical evidence here,
perhaps I should say, I PREFER to disagree -- on the double affricates.
Here I agree with ~mark's pronunciation. ("Geminate" is
phonetician-speak for "double", especially within a word.) It's true that in
Italian affricates are geminated as he describes, by lengthening the
"hold"; and I'll take his word on it for the other relevant languages he
knows well (does Polish have geminate affricates?). 

(*affricate -- a sound in which you bottle up the outflowing breath and
then release it with a friction-noise made by the air flowing through a
narrow passage, like the "ch" in English "cheese": first you stop it up,
almost like for a "t" sound, and then you let it go with a shushing "sh"
sound.)

But when English has a geminate affricate -- which, remember, normally
comes only between two words or morphemes -- both are normally
released. "Judge Jones" doesn't sound the same as "Judd Jones", at
least not in most Americans' speech. So I pronounce Klingon <jj> and
<chch> with two releases. (Besides, it sounds harsher that way! }}};-)\  )

For example (and not very meaningfully, in the tradition of "She sells sea
shells by the sea shore"):
   'etlhtlhoghDaq bIchechchugh yI'IQQo', nIjjajbe' mInDu'lIj!
  (If you're drunk at a shotgun wedding, don't be sad, may your eyes not
leak!)

This silly sentence has geminates of all four Klingon affricates (ch j Q tlh;
for Q as affricate, listen to MO's pronunciation on the tapes).
<'etlhtlhogh> is a compound noun I just made up, because there aren't
any suffixes beginning with tlh.

And by the way, beHwI''av: Apart from any grammatical discussions,
don't use the ASCII quotation mark character in your name. There's no
such letter in Klingon. Use two apostrophes. Besides, quotation marks
are one of the ways we have of showing the boundary between Klingon
and English text.

      marqem, tlhIngan veQbeq la'Hom -- Heghbej ghIHmoHwI'pu'!
     Subcommander Markemm, 
            Klingon Sanitation Corps -- Death to Litterbugs!

               Mark A. Mandel : [email protected]
   Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
320 Nevada St. : Newton, MA 02160, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com/
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