tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Mar 03 07:27:14 2003
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Re: {oy}, diphthong or V+C
On Sat, 1 Mar 2003 14:36:57 -0500
Alan Anderson <[email protected]> wrote:
> >That
> >the final vowel and the /oy/ diphthong are turned into a
> new
> >sound (diphthong or triphthong).
>
> {oy} in the Klingon endearment suffix is not a diphthong.
> The Klingon {y}
> there is a consonant.
I don't want to go too much into the phonetics here but I
assumed that {oy} was considered a diphthong since it was
described as a separate 'sound' in the TKD (like {aw}, {ew},
{Iy}, etc.), in the same way that the English phoneme system
would describe the /oI/ in "ahoy!" as one sound (ie a
diphthong), instead of leaving it to users of the phoneme
system to combine /o/ and /I/. I thought that the {oy} in
the tlhIngan Hol phoneme system was not exactly the same as
the sum of {o} and either {I} or {y} but considered more
like a sound in itself. Am I completely wrong here, or -
assuming you, knowing more about the language, not being
wrong - is the truth somewhere in the middle?
Then again, I assume that, phonetically (on the
realisational level) it doesn't really matter that much,
does it, whether the sound represented by {y} in this
(Klingon) context should be considered a vowel or consonant.
Please enlighten me!
--qeyS--