tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon May 13 21:49:09 1996

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Re: Phonology once again (was: Re: qaSovlu' jIneH)

macheq writes:
>...In this point I decided I must listen carefully to my English-speaking
>clients, how they do pronounce their final stops. maybe I was mistaken
>thinking that Anglophones don't echo their vowels at the end. (Some of them
>have even remarked, as I think, that instead of listening to WHAT they say
>I was observing them & listening to HOW they say/speak/pronounce or whatever).
>Unfortunately most of my clients are Polish, then 50-50 Anglo's and Franco's.
>
>Result: I HAVE FOUND NO SLIGHTEST SIGN OF ANY ECHO. What is following the
>final stops is just a puff of air, as if you'd like to blow off a candle,
>only much weaker. Exactly as in other languages I know.

And that's how I hear Okrand himself pronouncing terminal glottal stops
on the tapes.  The "echoed vowel" description is apparently for speakers
of English who don't know what a glottal stop is.

>As Marc Okrand (reH yInjaj! 'ej reH najtaHvIS qeylIS ghomjaj!) is the only
>native speaker of tlhIngan Hol we know, his
>pronounciation is the final authority to us. If you treat everything he
>has written about grammar as a "sacred rule" why are you reluctant
>to accept as same what he has written of the sounds? And why do you
>completely disregard what he has "pronounced" on the cassettes?

He isn't a native speaker of tlhIngan Hol.  He's a student, just like the
rest of us.  He just has the privileged position of being at the source.
His pronunciation is undeniably *wrong* in one or two cases; he is not
infallible.  Your constant {reH yInjaj...} implies that you think of him
as a deity of some sort, and that's not an appropriate comparison.

>No meta-linguistical explanations satisfy me. Are you so big a
>*tlhIngan Hol guru* that you can judge what is important and valid out
>of what Marc Okrand (reH yInjaj! 'ej reH najtaHvIS qeylIS ghomjaj!)
>has said and what is unimportant or only "situational"
>due to the circumstances of the origin of the language?

Actually, "tlhIngan Hol guru" describes a few KLI members quite well.
If you insist on dismissing "meta-linguistical" explanations, you're
going to lose out on some interesting information.

>>I know of no language which is pronounced precisely the same
>>by all its speakers, except for those which have only one speaker (and
>>probably not even they are perfectly consistent).
>
>
>And that's exactly the case of tlhIngan Hol. It has ONE speaker, Marc Okrand
>(reH yInjaj! 'ej reH najtaHvIS qeylIS ghomjaj!), and many impersonators -
>both in ST and in KLI and surroundings (including yourself and myself).

Marc Okrand is *not* the only speaker of tlhIngan Hol.  We are *not*
"impersonators".  Would you claim that all the speakers of Esperanto
are merely "impersonating" the language's inventor?  Though the actors
who play Klingons on Star Trek surely can be described as impersonators;
that's what actors *are*!

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

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