tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Feb 20 12:46:04 1998
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Re: introduction
>Date: Mon, 9 Feb 1998 21:26:09 -0800 (PST)
>From: Alan Anderson <[email protected]>
>
>Guess what? There *is* such a universal phonetic alphabet. I don't know
>the ASCII representation of the International Phonetic Alphabet, but I'm
>pretty sure someone here can give the symbols for the Klingon {r} and {gh},
>and might also be able to identify the Dutch trilled and gargled "r"s.
There are a bunch of different representations of the International
Phonetic Alphabet in ASCII, and which is preferable is the subject of no
few religious wars on places like the constructed-language list. Some URLs
to look at for various attempts are
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/home.htm,
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/x-sampa.htm,
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~dpb/ascii-ipa.html.
Okrand has said that when he was developing Klingon he used IPA to
represent its sounds, not the romanized notation we've come to know and
tolerate. I don't know that he's ever actually given out his notation in
that form, though.
As for me, I'll try transcribing the sounds of Klingon as best I can, using
X-SAMPA for no reason other than that my web browser happens to be pointing
there. I don't have a favorite transcription scheme. The transcriptions
will be fairly broad, which they sort of have to be when describing a
phoneme in isolation.
Klingon X-SAMPA
b b
ch t_S
D d`
gh G (IPA gamma)
H x
j d_Z
l l
m m
n n
ng N
p p (probably p_h, really)
q q (perhaps q_h)
Q q_X
r r (IPA r), sometimes 4 or r\` (I think)
S s`
t t (or t_h)
tlh t_K (more narrowly, t_l_K)
v v
w w
y j
' ? (glottal stop)
I don't know Dutch well enough to try transcribing the Dutch g's and r's; I
seem to recall hearing that Dutch g is in fact an IPA gamma, like Klingon
gh, but I could be mistaken. It has also been said that no two languages
actually have "the same sound" for anything, by some definition.
~mark