tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jan 19 00:27:53 2004

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Re: glottal stop in spanish?

Alan Anderson ([email protected]) [KLI Member] [Hol po'wI']

ja' "Mark J. Reed" <[email protected]>:
>The glottal stop *is* a sound, and it appears in place of the <h>, if at all,
>only at the beginning of a breath group.   For instance, "tu hablas" is
>[tuablas], all run together with no glottal stop between.

According to my high school Spanish teacher, an excruciatingly correct
pronunciation would *never* put a glottal stop in front of a word beginning
with [silent] "h".  Someone asking /'abla espan~ol/ would be

>In other words, the <h> is *completely* silent; it does not represent
>any sound at all, not even a glottal stop.  What you are noticing is
>that Spanish speakers, like English speakers, tend to pronounce a glottal stop
>before a vowel at the beginning of a breath group.  So, as a word by itself,
><agua> would likely be pronounced ['agua], with a leading glottal stop,
>despite the lack of any <h>.  The <h> makes no difference whatsoever,
>except in some cases to keep two vowels from blending into a diphthong.

The way I understand it, Spanish "agua" can get the glottal stop sound in
front of it *because* it lacks a leading "h".  It's like an anti-letter.

We have it a lot easier here.  Written Klingon is a strictly phonetic
(phonemic, phonomic, phenolic, whatever) system, with a theoretically
perfect correspondence between sound and symbolic representation.
(Dialectical variations aren't necessarily shown, but they can be explicit
if desired, with uncommon Klingon "letters" like {N} and {glh}.)

-- ghunchu'wI'

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