tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Apr 24 08:28:50 2012
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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] qaghwI'
At 00:52 '?????' 4/24/2012, you wrote:
ghItlhpu' Qov, jatlh:
> So I'd have the same grumbling about it in Hawai'ian. Find me a
> language with a native writing system and a phonemic glottal stop
> that treats the glottal stop differently from t and k and q and I'll
> be convinced.
Classic Maya might be such a language.
I didn't realize the Mayans had invented writing. I thought they
just had qIppu (sp?) knotted ropes for record keeping. Or am I
getting confused with the Aztecs? Or is Maya an Australian language
unrelated to Mayans? I could ask Google, but that's way over there
in that other window.
Glottal stop is phonemic (though
only rarely word-initially; there are no syllable characters in Maya
dedicated to vowel-only syllables as distinct from glottal stop + vowel)
but the characters for the glottal stop syllables - /'a 'e 'i 'o 'u/ -
are often dropped from the ends of words where a glottal stop should
appear:
ka' "two" written /ka/, not /ka-'a/
but
ha' "this, that": /ha-'a/
mo' "macaw": written /mo-'o/ or even /mo-'o-'o/
macaw: that does place it in South America.
ma' "not": written /ma-'a/ or /ma/
Wow, that sounds exactly like Okrand's description of Klingon glottal stop.
and though there's not a distinction between final glottal stop and zero,
the loss of final glottal stop-vowel characters does hide a phonemic
distinction between /'/ and /h/, which is also often underspelled:
chih "deer": written in full /chi-hi/ or underspelled /chi/
chi' "a fermented drink": underspelled /chi/
nah "great, large": underspelled /na/
na' "lady": underspelled /na/
Glottal stop tends to behave weirdly in most languages, even those that
possess it phonemically. Even in Klingon it does, in a small way: it's
the only consonant that attracts stress to a syllable ending in it.
That's a good point. And it's "impossible" not to pronounce it before
an otherwise initial vowel. Okay now I can imagine an early native
writing system that didn't have the qaghwI' because speakers thought
of it as a stress not really a sound, and the qaghwI' being added in
a later spelling reform, thereby getting a different shape and name.
It's all good here! Thanks! DaH pIqaD vIlajlaHchu'.
(dance)
- Qov
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