tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jul 02 11:47:53 1996
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Re: KLBC
- From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: KLBC
- Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 14:47:49 -0400 (EDT)
- In-reply-to: <[email protected]> (message fromKrenath on Sun, 30 Jun 1996 19:35:08 -0700)
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>Date: Sun, 30 Jun 1996 19:35:08 -0700
>From: Krenath <[email protected]>
>The only other language I can draw from is Spanish. With very few
>exceptions, most of the Spanish letters are named by merely using the sound
>the letter makes, and sufixing (and occasionally prefixing) the sound with
>the Spanish letter "e" (okay, there's a few other vowels in there too, but
>not many) when necessary to make it pronounceable. Compared to the
>mish-mash of names English has, Spanish is amazingly consistent and regular
>(high fiber diet?)
I don't mean this to be too much of a digression, but don't put too much
stock in Spanish (its letter-names were derived almost exactly the same as
English's). Or on second thought, maybe you SHOULD, since it's a fairly
intuitive derivation. When the Phoenician alphabet was borrowed by the
Etruscans (from whom the Romans borrowed it, and thence to the Romance
languages and Germanics etc), they threw out the old Semitic letter-names,
which were derived from words, the ancient pictograms that were the basis
for the letters. Vowels were named by simply the vowel, stops by the sound
of the consonant followed by the vowel "e" (except for C and Q, which were
taken as variants of K before front and back vowels, respectively, so they
were KE (C) and KU (Q) and K went to KA), and continuants were just the
sound of the continuant (fff, hhh, lll, etc). The continuants eventually
developed epenthetic "e" vowels before them, since the languages started to
frown on syllabic continuant consonants (el, ef, etc); H got harder and
harder to pronounce as the sound dropped out of the languages in question,
so they used tricks to get it somehow obvious to them and their mouths,
calling it "ahha", "akka", etc. which "aitch" in much the same way that
Latin "vacca" became French "vache." In English, the vowels all were
subjected to the Great Vowel Shift, and of course there were other letters
added in the course of time (G, J, U, W, Z (which was dropped and
restored). The origin of "wye" for Y is uncertain).
On the whole, actually not a really lousy way to invent letter-names. At
least, when you get the letters from another language and don't have native
baggage attached (as the Etruscans did. Hebrew, at least, retains names
derived from the old Semitic roots, as does Greek, which apparently just
didn't bother to get rid of them). But who can say the origin of Klingon
pIqaD? The prehistory of the Klingon people is likely to be at least as
complex as our own, with multiple nation-states, languages, cultures,
etc... Still, letter-names along these lines are pretty believable. I
still like the ones that use words, too. I find them interesting. There's
room for both; after all, even in English we appreciate the value of Able,
Baker, Charlie (I know, that's not the true modern set) spelling to avoid
confusion with the nine letters that sound like #ee for some consonant #.
>'a' be' che' De' 'e' ghe' He' 'I' je' le' me' ne' nge'
> 'o' pe' qa' Qe' re' Se' te' tlhe' 'u' ve' we' ye' ' (?)
Why "qa'" and not "qe'"?
~mark
tlhIngan pIqaD vIqel, 'ej DIvI' pIqaD pongmey qun vIqel 'ej vIDel.
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