tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Apr 19 08:45:03 1996
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Re: Phonology and surroundings (including copula)
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Phonology and surroundings (including copula)
- Date: Fri, 19 Apr 1996 11:44:19 -0400 (EDT)
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]> from "Consulat General de Pologne" at Apr 19, 96 07:35:34 am
According to Consulat General de Pologne:
>
> Yesterday I could't fall asleep as I was thinking all the time about Klingon
> phonology. And I came out to a conclusion, that there is something more
> special to {-'} than what I have written before.
>
> TKD p. 16: "Occasionally the echo is quite audible, with a guttural sound
> like {gh} preceeding the echoed vowel. Fo example {yIlI'} "transmit it!"
> ^^^^^^^^^
> can sound more like {yIlI'ghI}. This extra-heavy echo is heard most
> often when the speaker is particularly excited or angry."
When I read this sort of thing in TKD, I imagine Okrand, having
coached the actors and coached the actors and COACHED the
actors, then looking at the film clip of a scene where an actor
did something he didn't tell them to do, wincing, covering his
eyes, moving his hand to his chin, staring at the ceiling and
then muttering, "How can I explain THIS one? I mean, I made up
{HISlaH} to cover the actor who couldn't say {HIja'}. I made up
{rIntaH} to explain why Valkris, who was filmed speaking
English, kept moving her lips when she had already had enough
syllables to speak her line. How can I explain this weird sound
the actor just made when I told him to use a glottal stop?" He
then takes another note for his unpublished dictionary.
> toH!
>
> Wow! Don't you realise that this would be the only case of a voiceless
> stop that when voiced changes also the place of articulation from
> glottal into guttural?
Or an actor who doesn't have a clue how to say what he has been
told to say...
> I always supposed there is something special about {'}. Duj tIvoqtaH!
>
>
> Of course this "new" {gh} is only like the old {gh} we already know.
> I would prefer to write this new sound as {'gh}.
I'd actually prefer to not write it at all, since it is just a
description of a common mispronunciation, and not an alternate
spelling of the word. Note that {'gh} is not a consonant
cluster within a syllable in any word in the word list, nor is
it a syllable unto itself.
> And so I come to a conclusion (a hypothesis) that maybe {rgh} is in fact
> not a cluster of {r} + {gh} but a cluster of {r} + {'gh} i.e. voiced {-'}.
Except, of course, that {rgh} appears at the end of a lot of
syllables in the word list and {r'gh} doesn't appear anywhere
at all...
> (The second hypothesis I take into consideration is that {rgh} is a phoneme
> of its own and not a cluster at all).
While that may be an interesting thought, the truth is that if
you stack {r} next to {gh} at a syllable boundary where {r}
ends one syllable and {gh} begins the next, it sounds exactly
like {rgh} at the end of a syllable. So, if you have one
phoneme which sounds exactly like a sequence of two existing
phonemes, one usually refers to it as a compound of those two
phonemes, qar'a'? I don't know any other phonemes in Klingon
which sound exactly like a sequence of two other phonemes
existing in the language. Phonemes are supposed to be
elemental, not compound.
In Cherokee, for example, the symbols of the syllabary do not
represent phonemes. They represent whole syllables which are
composed of more elemental phonemes. The phoneme "s" is the
same, whether in the cherokee syllable "s", "so", "si", "sa",
"sv" [rhymes with "lung" without the "ng", though it kinda
still starts off the "ng" sound and kinda trails off...] or
"su". So all these symbols are syllables, but not phonemes.
> Qapla'
>
> macheq
charghwI'
--
reH lugh charghwI' net Sov.