tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Dec 06 06:33:52 1996

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Re: Glottal stop ['] question(s)

On Wed, 4 Dec 1996 12:40:23 -0800 "Mark E. Shoulson" 
<[email protected]> wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> 
> >Date: Tue, 3 Dec 1996 09:58:33 -0800
> >From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
> >
> >In some other languages, like Hawaiian, initial vowels can be 
> >started more softly than they are in English. The word "Hawaii" 
> >in Hawaiian does not, for example, begin with an "H" sound at 
> >all, but it sounds too soft to spell "Awaii", so we add the "H", 
> >since English has no such soft onset.
> 
> Your idea is right but I have to nitpick the example.  

Thanks for the new information.

> "Hawai'i" in
> Hawai'ian really *does* start with an "H" sound, which exists in Hawa'ian
> as a distinct sound as it does in English.  However, you are correct that
> there are words in the Hawai'ian language which do not begin with glottal
> stops... The
> glottal stop is a full consonant in Hawai'ian, and there are words which
> can only be distinguished by its presence or absence at the beginning.
> 
> >In other words, in English, the word "attitude" would be spelled 
> >in Klingon {'atItuD} because we ALWAYS start our open vowels 
                                                    ^^^^
> >with a glottal stop, just like Klingons do, except Klingons have 
> >a letter of the alphabet for it and English speakers don't.
> 
> As has been pointed out, "ALWAYS" may be too strong a term, but your point
> is still valid.  If you listen closely in conversation, you'll find that
> the phrase "in English" for example, often is pronounced "InInglIS" with no
> stop at the beginning of the word "English" (and sometimes the stop is
> there, depending on the speaker and the emphasis being placed).  

My point is that when you pronounce it as {'InInglIS} (Don't 
forget the glottal stop in front of that first {I}), the "E" in 
"English" is no longer an open vowel. We elide in that instance. 
In English we ALWAYS either begin open vowels with a glottal 
stop, or borrow a consonant from the end of a previous word. We 
never pronounce the word "English" beginning with the vowel 
alone. We don't know how. When we were toddlers, nobody prompted 
us a gazillion times on the difference between the bare vowel 
and one beginning with the glottal stop the way they taught us 
to stop using "w" where "r" should go. (Hawai'ian mothers are 
different.) Our syllables always start with consonants with the 
glottal stop as the invisible consonant we never spell, but 
always use whenever there is no other consonant to borrow from 
the previous syllable.

That is why splitting English words into syllables is often so 
arbitrary. A consonant can be a syllable boundary and in fact 
belong to both syllables, but we have to assign it to one or 
the other so we can hyphenate lines and stuff, so we make 
arbitrary choices. "English" becomes "Eng-lish", even though the 
"g" really belongs in both syllables. We pronounce it 
"Eng-glish", since "ng" is pronounced different from just an "n" 
followed by a "g", but the beginning of "lish" is entirely too 
soft for the way most people pronounce the word "English".

But that's not a great example of this particular point. We know 
that "pilot" has to be split "pi-lot" because we say it as "pie 
let", not as "pile et". If we used the latter, we'd need a 
glottal stop. "letter" is broken as "let-ter", even though that 
is not how we pronounce it. We say it as "le-tter" because it is 
too much work to pronounce both "t"s and we can't let it become 
"lett-er" because again, we'd need another glottal stop. In 
truth, I think the "tt" is itself the boundary of the two 
syllables, as much as the hypen we try to insert, but that would 
make it very difficult to notate in a dictionary, unless we 
split the two "t"s, even though we only pronounce one of them.

I knew one woman who pronounced both "t"s in "letter" and it 
sounded funny. I caught her similarly pronouncing two "t"s in 
"water". She considered herself to be the only person on the 
planet who properly pronounced English. She was missing the 
point.

> We don't
> like having vowels at the beginnings of utterances or after pauses with
> nothing in front of them, but in mid-speech we will often borrow the
> closing consonant of the previous word to prevent it, rather than
> interpolating a glottal stop.

Yep. The point is that in English, there are no OPEN initial 
vowels. We close them by borrowing from a previous consonant, or 
by adding an invisible glottal stop, which brings us back to the 
original question of "How do you pronounce the glottal stop at 
the beginning of syllables in Klingon." The answer is, "Exactly 
the way you pronounce it in English without knowing it." The one 
caveat is that you have to remember to never elide between 
syllables in Klingon as you so commonly do in English. If "in 
English" were Klingon words, you could never get away with 
pronouncing them as {'InInglIS}. It would ALWAYS be pronounced 
{'In 'InglIS}. It would not be a matter of expression or 
emphasis. The second pronunciation is right. The first is wrong.
 
> In any case, we *do* use the stop, as you point out.

Thanks, both for agreeing and for making the specifics of the 
comment more accurate.
 
> ~mark

charghwI'

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