tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu May 29 23:44:00 2003
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Re: the glottal stop
ja' Sangqar:
>...In my dialect,
>'h' is a separate sound, not merely the lack of a glottal stop. Consider
>the sentences 'he eats' and 'he heats'. In my dialect, there is no glottal
>stop in either sentence, and yet the words 'eats' and 'heats' are easily
>distinguishable.
vaj pImbej QIchmaj. There is definitely a glottal stop in the middle of
"he eats" when *I* say it, whether I'm being extremely careful or not.
>Also note (as shown above in 'he eats') that the glottal stop only intrudes
>if there's no previous consonant sound. In the sentence 'I ate an apple',
>only the first vowel has a glottal stop in front of it (in my dialect).
I get a distinct glottal stop before "I", "ate", and "apple", myself. I
can feel an attempt one before "an" as well, but it's masked by the "t"
sound at the end of "ate". If I try to be intentionally oversmooth and
avoid glottal stops, it comes out more like "I hate napple."
>(Unless you're enunciating each word carefully, and therefore pronouncing it
>in isolation).
Careful enunciation is still possible in flowing speech. Indeed, I cannot
avoid a glottal stop in "he eats", no matter how carelessly I enunciate. I
must explicitly try to say "heats" in order not to get one.
>In the Klingon sentence {'och 'el 'av}, each word has a
>glottal stop at the beginning.
In Klingon, the glottal stop is an explicit phoneme, as basic as "p" is in
English. It's like saying "Pigs pack punches" has a "p" at the beginning
of each word. To compare with English glottal stops, you'd have to find a
feature of Klingon pronunciation that doesn't get transcribed. Maybe the
variant sound of the Klingon vowel {I} would be a good analogy.
-- ghunchu'wI'