tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Mar 09 09:43:21 2003
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Re: {oy}, diphthong or V+C
ja' Sangqar:
>From a phonetic point of view, "car" as pronounced in some dialects (Boston
>comes to mind) only has one consonant, right at the beginning of the word.
That's a dialectical variation, not a standard feature of the language.
One does not *teach* an English language student to pronounce "car" to
sound like the name of the snake in The Jungle Book.
>The presence of a second 'consonant' at the end of the word is an artifact
>of the writing system (or more properly, an artifact of the relative
>uniformity of the writing system across dialect variations).
It's that way in the writing system for a reason. It's a feature of the
*standard* dialect. If you're studying English in depth, dropped /r/
merits a footnote, but it doesn't rise to the level of a rule.
>It seems we're speaking in different contexts here. I'm talking about
>phonetics and you seem to be talking about orthography.
Phonetics applies to the spoken language.
Orthograpy applies to the written language.
For our purposes, phonetics and orthography are the same thing. While
there are allophonic variations between syllable-initial and syllable-final
pronunciations of certain consonants, the writing system we use is intended
as a strict representation of the sounds of the language.
>My point is that if
>the letter combination {oy} makes the sound /oI/, it's phonetically a
>diphthong, whereas if it makes the sound /oj/, it's not. The sound /oI/, no
>matter what letter or letters you use to spell it, is phonetically a
>diphthong.
Let me probe your definitions a bit. In the English words "label",
"legal", and "level", I assume you agree that the initial "l" is a
consonant. How about the final one? Is it a consonant? A vowel?
Something else?
>>Klingon {y} is a consonant. It appears only in places that other Klingon
>>consonants appear, and it never appears in places that only vowels appear.
>
>This bit makes me quite sure you're talking about orthography. I can easily
>turn this on its head and say that the combination {oy} is a vowel. It only
>appears in places where other vowels appear, and never appears in places
>where only consonants appear.
choyajbe'.
In that word, notice that {oy} appears immediately before {a}. Vowels
don't do that in Klingon.
-- ghunchu'wI'