tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Feb 15 08:27:34 1998
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Re: Letter sounds question
>Date: Wed, 4 Feb 1998 21:54:47 -0800 (PST)
>From: "Thaddaeus A. Vick" <[email protected]>
>
>At 09:12 PM 2/4/98 -0800, you wrote:
>>I'm not sure about the reference to Chinese, but I do know that the
>>Klingon S is sort of halfway between english "s" and "sh", or at least
>>that's the impression I got from the cassette.
>
> It's a palatalized s. That means you say an s, but with the tip
>of your tongue stuck up in the roof of your mouth.
It's a *retroflexed* s, with your tongue stuck up in the roof of your
mouth.
Grammarian's story: before the tapes came out, I read the description of
[S] in TKD. It said (a) it was between /s/ and /sh/, and (b) that it was
pronounced with your tongue pointing to the top of your mouth. As I
interpreted those statements, they were not quite in accord. I gave
primacy to the first, and decided that [S] was pronounced as a palatal s
(which is pronounced about where we pronounce /t/, maybe a bit farther
back), since in my mind that sound best captured "between /s/ and /sh/".
Krankor paid more attention to the second description, and determined it
was a retroflex s. We founf this out the first time we spoke to one
another in person. No real argument about it, just discovered we had
interpreted it differently.
Of course, when the tapes came out we could clearly hear it's retroflex.
~mark