tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Apr 19 09:30:31 1996
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Re: Phonology and surroundings (including copula)
- From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Phonology and surroundings (including copula)
- Date: Fri, 19 Apr 1996 12:30:27 -0400 (EDT)
- In-reply-to: <[email protected]> (message fromConsulat General de Pologne on Fri, 19 Apr 1996 07:35:34 -0700)
>Date: Fri, 19 Apr 1996 07:35:34 -0700
>From: Consulat General de Pologne <#[email protected]>
>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."
>toH!
You seem fond of making mountains out of molehills. Bear in mind that
Okrand was doing his damnedest to try to explain how to get a good, strong,
easy-to-recognize glottal stop in final position to a linguistically naive
audience. I've spoken to *educated* people, in college, who only just
realized that "t" and "d" are similar sounds, different mainly in voicing.
A word-final glottal stop is a totally new concept to most
English-speakers, and he's using all the tricks he can to make it make
sense. In addition, he's also trying to explain away the various vagaries
of pronunciation inflicted on the lines by some of the actors (like when he
said that "baH" is sometimes pronounced "maH" to back-fit Marc Lenard's
reading of the proto-tlhIngan invented by James Doohan in the first
movie). Note it's a sound "like" gh, not a true "gh". I wouldn't put much
stock in the use of "gutteral" meaning it's truly in a phonemically
distinct point of articulation. He's not using language precisely here:
this is a book in which he has to describe a retroflex stop as being
produced "halfway between the teeth and... that part of the roof of the
mouth that is rather gooshy." If you pronounce a glottal stop good and
strong, and especially if you're not very good at glottal stops, you'll
hear some air escaping through it. If you haven't cut off your voice
properly (as if you were too excited and shouting) you'll hear *voice*
escaping through. That's a voiced glottal fricative isn't it? And to
someone who's finally starting to understand what Klingon "gh" sounds like,
it's pretty close, and a good way to describe it.
>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?
You might as well pay close attention to "qa" "qe" "qI" and marvel that the
"q" is pronounced in different places, slowly creeping up closer and closer
to being more velar than uvular. The mouth is a continuum, and all sounds
are affected by neighboring ones.
>Of course this "new" {gh} is only like the old {gh} we already know.
>I would prefer to write this new sound as {'gh}.
No, this "new" gh is just an excited pronunciation of ' and that's all it
is.
I can sort of see your theories that gh is an voiced counterpart to '
(there are cases where voiced and unvoiced consonants have slightly
different points of articulation -- Klingon is an extreme example, with
Okrand having chosen t and D but not T and d deliberately because there are
no languages known which select those consonants so inconsistently) and
thus explaining the -rgh cluster as having originated from -r'. But I'm
not sure where you'll get evidence for it, or even what difference it would
make if you were "right" (in whatever sense you can be said to be "right"
about the mythic history of an invented language).
~mark