tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Sep 27 23:02:22 1995

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Re: }} ST Communicator vItu'laHbe'!



Marc Ruehlaender <[email protected]> writes:
>I think {e} is a closer representation of schwa than I
>and to most germans short english <a> sounds more like
>an open [E] than like [a] because we don't have a sound
>in between the two. I guessed that the same would go
>for Klingons ({a} is to me as in "father", never as in
>"as" or "at" or "cat"). Thus I turned all of these into
>{e}. I'm not that sure about welsh "y" (wether it should
>be pronounced /i/ or /@/ in Gwyn_y_th). Remains (I think)
>Dawson. I really speak {DawSon} as Dow sone (same vowels
>as in Dow Jones :)

Hmm.  I pronounce the beginning of "Dawson" the same way I pronounce
the beginning of "doggie".  Is english "doggie" closer to klingon
{DawghIy} or {DoghIy}?  (I'm getting some strange looks from my son
as I pronounce each of these repeatedly.)  I pick {DawghIy}.  As for
the second syllable, after much muttering, I think {SIn} and {Sen}
are equally good, and both are better than {Son}.

>> vowels is appropriate, with the possible exception of
>> the second {a} in {barbara'}.  I think it sounds a
>> little better as {barbera'}.
>>
>do you speak the last a as in father?
>I pronunce this roughly as [ba:(r)br@]
>(where (r) denotes rhotization)

[@] is a schwa, right?  I don't know the notation and I don't know
what "rhotization" is, but I think I can approximate my pronunciation
as [bar-b@-r@] with the first [@] closer to short [I] and the second
closer to short [E].

But this is all pretty pointless.  Names aren't Klingon words, so
there's no real reason to try to apply Klingon pronunciation to them.
Some human languages have sounds that aren't used in some other human
languages; pronunciation can get a bit arbitrary when trying to spell
names in a languages which don't have a matching set of sounds.

 -- ghunchu'wI'               batlh Suvchugh vaj batlh SovchoH vaj





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