tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Dec 14 15:13:25 1993

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Re: tlhIngan Hol qun vIwam - an article

     Okay, ONE MORE TIME FROM THE TOP:

     I did NOT say that TKD does not tell us how to pronounce a glottal stop.
I did not say that glottal stops cannot be pronounced before a lone syllable.
I did not say it would be difficult to pronounce a glottal stop before a lone
syllable.

     I said that TKD does not tell us how to prounounce a glottal stop at the
beginning of a lone syllable. It tells us how to divide two syllables with a
glottal stop. Period.

     Perhaps some of us believe that should be enough, but I believe that for
the kind of general audience TKD is generally designed to approach, it would
have been quite appropriate to have specifically addressed the pronunciation
of a glottal stop at the opening of a lone syllable as a separate issue.

     I have not noticed anything on either tape (CK or PK) or during the live
spoken Klingon that I heard at Stellarcon 17 that was clear enough to ME that
Marc Okrand pronounces anything at all that would differentiate between {'eH}
and {eH}, except that the latter is never an accepted spelling. So far as
anyone just reading TKD and hearing CK and PK are concerned, a glottal stop
at the beginning of a lone syllable may simply be a formality in order to
prevent elision of vowels when prefixes end in lone vowels without glottal
stops (as they all do). This is ESPECIALLY true, since he goes to such GREAT
lengths to repeatedly explain how a glottal stop sounds at the END of a
syllable. If someone would like to point me to an example on CK or PK that I
can listen to, knowing that I am hearing a clearly pronounced opening glottal
stop on a lone syllable, I'll be happy to drop the whole issue, but I have
yet to have anyone point me to such an example.

     Any takers, among those who think their foreheads are not smoother than
my own?

--   charghwI'

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