tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Oct 12 12:22:48 1993

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Re: opinions on Orthography & Phonetics

On Oct 12, 12:54am, [email protected] wrote:
> Subject: opinions on Orthography & Phonetics
> 
> First of all, to all who are bickering over the "i" v. "I" issue:
...

     Without wishing a major conflict, I have to express that for all the
things this writer has said with which I agree, there is very little here I
find agreeable. I, too, have learned the Schoen alphabet and I like it, but I
have to recognize that Okrand has explicitly avoided endorsing it because the
characters were created by Okudo (sp?), the fellow who does all the art work
design of ST sets. He writes the Klingon on the set and he is mysteriously
offended by the idea that anything written in Klingon could actually be read
by anybody, so he goes through an equally mysterious greeking process to
label anything on a set in Klingon. Mostly, he reserves the power to control
the appearance of written Klingon and he won't give that up regardless of
rational arguement to the contrary.

     I suspect we'd adapt the Schoen characters anyway, except that many of
us are limited on this list to the ASCII character set.

     I also see no basis whatsoever for ignoring a glottal stop in the middle
of a word simply because it was silent when the root word was spoken without
a prefix. It was silent only because it is difficult to start a syllable with
a glottal stop. Just try it. I DARE you. I know. *I*'ve certainly tried.

     Okrand INTENTIONALLY made some of the consonant combinations difficult
in order to make them less "natural", and so less human. That's why the "t"
and "D" sounds use different tongue positions. You are unlikely to find that
in a human language. He has said so, publicly. A glottal stop is a glottal
stop anywhere except the beginning of a word, where it remains silent because
Okrand said nothing about glottal STARTS.

> Any /'/ that seperates two vowels does nothing more than seperate
> the vowels, and it tends to leans toward the second syllable. 

     Sorry, dude. You have no case. There's nothing in TKD, CK, TNG or
anything in the movie series to back you up. Nada. Pagh. Rien. El Zero.

--   charghwI'

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