tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Apr 03 21:18:20 1994

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Re: HolQeD letter response

Guido#1vo'
     *    *    *

English has even done this to some extent: Which is easier to pronounce?
"Doubt" or "dout"? "Knife" or "nife"? "Wrench" or "rench"? We have simply
retained the old spellings.

     *    *    *
The "b" in "doubt" is a historical impostor.  It was NEVER
pronounced: English borrowed the word from (Middle?) French
"doute".  Then some pedantic wise-ass with more learning than
sense decided to "restore" the spelling to something more like
the earlier source, Latin "dubito", and stuck in a "b".

As for "easier to pronounce", that varies wildly with time and
place.  And as languages lose sounds, e.g. in simplifying
consonant clusters by dropping consonants (which is the case in
all three of these examples, including the spurious "doubt"),
words start to sound alike.  "Write", "right", "rite", and
"wright" didn't use to be homophones, but when English
     - lost "w" before "r"
     - lost the voiceless velar fricative (Klingon H) that was
spelled "gh",
     - and lost unstressed final "e"
    (- together maybe with some vowel changes)
all four of these words fell together in pronunciation.  And
homophones are a major source of ambiguity.  ("Turn left here?"
"Right. --  NO, WHAT ARE YOU DOING, LEFT, LEFT!!!")

More to the point, there's no reason that ng and n have to fall
together.  Plenty of languages in the world keep them quite
distinct.  And I would expect Klingon, with its wealth of velars
(H gh ng) and uvulars (q Q), to be a language out of the world
that does the same.

- marqem

                         Mark A. Mandel 
    Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200 
  320 Nevada St. :  Newton, Mass. 02160, USA : [email protected]

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