tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Apr 18 04:35:37 1997

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: pronunciation of tlh-H

One of the comments qoror made when he started this thread was that in 
regard to the audio tape:

> "tlh" there sounds like just a "tl." 

Which I think brings up an important point for folks who haven't had the 
benefit (and excruciating hell) of going through a course on 
international phonetics.  And that point is: there is a huge difference 
between being able to *hear* a particular phoneme and being able to 
*produce* it.

Some people have a very good ear, and once they learn to discriminate 
subtle features readily detect the dental /t/ used by a native spanish 
speaker which they never teach you in high school spanish (at least, they 
didn't when I was growing up in southern California!).  These same 
people, though they can hear minute differences, may be lousy at 
producing the sounds themselves in anything approaching reliability.

The reverse situation is also quite common, particularly if you have a 
good working knowledge of articulatory phonetics and a good coach.  I 
recall quite a few students who had mastered the production of some very 
difficult (for monolingual English speakers) phonemes, who could 
consistently alternate between minimal pairs (i.e., two phonemes 
differing in only a single feature, such as aspiration or voicing) but 
who could not hear the difference that they *knew* they were making.

So when qoror says that the "tlh" of Klingon sounds to him like it's 
really just "tl" I believe him.  Ironically perhaps, he illustrates the 
point Okrand makes when he tells us that the Klingon word for themselves 
doesn'ht begin with a "k" (or even a "q") sound, but something quite 
different.  Human beings, regardless of your language community, when 
presented with a novel sound (i.e., one that is not part of your native 
repetoire) will try to make sense of it.  The cognitive processes that 
make up speech recognition practically INSIST upon this, and so since 
most dialects of English have neither voiceless "l" or "tl" clusters (and 
we infer the same to be true of "Federation standard" for our purposes), 
we instead map the sounds onto the next nearest thing which we *can* 
hear, and you end up with "klingon."  qoror has accepted that it's an 
initial "t" sound, but still doesn't have an ear for that darn voiceless 
"l," and so is still only halfway there, hearing "tlingon."

This is not cause for concern or alarm.  Many professional linguists have 
gone on record as requiring years to build up an ear for certain sounds. 
 So, persevere.

And of course, you can come to the qep'a' loSDIch, where Mark Mandel has 
agreed to repeat the truly excellent lecture he gave last year on the 
articulatory phonetics of tlhIngan Hol.  In the absence of a native 
speaker, there're aren't many better people to model your own speech on.

Lawrence


::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: Dr Lawrence M Schoen, Director   :: The KLI is a nonprofit ::
:: The Klingon Language Institute   :: tax exempt corporation ::
:: POB 634, Flourtown, PA 19031 USA :: DaH HuchlIj'e' ghonob  ::
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: [email protected] ::   http://www.kli.org   :: 215/836-4955 ::
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Back to archive top level