tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu May 16 11:18:02 1996
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Re: Phonology & surroundings
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>Date: Mon, 13 May 1996 20:05:10 -0700
>From: "Dr. Maciej St. Zieba" <[email protected]>
>"William H. Martin" <[email protected]> wrote:
>>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then takes another note for his unpublished dictionary.
>>
>I am not interested in any kind of those extra-lingusitic explanations,
>I'm afraid. I've already expressed my point of view that I do not
>find Star Trek in any important way related to tlhIngan Hol (except
>perhaps in Copyright ;-] ). I am interested in tlhIngan Hol internally,
>I accept TKD as the basic description of the language, Marc Okrand
>(reH yInjaj! 'ej reH najtaHvIS qeylIS ghomjaj!)
>on the cassettes as the only recorded native speaker of tlhIngan Hol
>and that's all. I do not watch ST and I don't even know what you are
>talking about. Coaching? Which page or rule of TKD are you talking
>about?
>}:-{))
You may be setting yourself up for confusion by how you choose to regard
these things. If you are taking TKD as your source, it's important to
recognize the conditions under which it was written, since they affected
how it was written and thus how concepts were expressed, which in turn
affects how they are understood. If you refuse to recognize such
"extra-linguistic" data, you're in danger of making major gaffes. For
example, I might interview a few informants of some language or another and
decide to discount the "extra-linguistic" conditions under which the
information was given to me (namely, that the informants all had bad colds
and were congested), and conclude that the language was deficient in
nasals, since they never pronounced a good, clean nasal released through
the nose. Or maybe the informant had lost a few teeth. Guess the
sibilants sound different in this language. These are extra-linguistic
conditions that affect how the information was conveyed to me. The
informants did not give me accurate examples of their phonene-stock,
because conditions prevented them. Okrand did not give us clear, precise,
and unambiguous descriptiopns of the phoneme-stock of tlhIngan Hol because
conditions prevented him (namely, the conditions of making the book
marketable to the masses). Extra-linguistic explanations may be tiresome,
but I'm afraid they're an unavoidable and important part of the process.
>>> 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...
>tlhIngan Hol's phonology is weird enough not to demand any extra-linguistic
>factor (some Terran trying to impersonate a Klingon on a TV show): Why not
>want to accept it might be weirdier even than you have dreamed of?
Maybe because he happens not to believe it is?
>>> 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.
>How do you know that this is a description of a *common mispronounciation*?
> ���
>and not an alternative pronounciation? Does TKD mention it in any place?
>Or maybe it has been revealed afterwards by Marc Okrand (reH yInjaj! 'ej
>reH najtaHvIS qeylIS ghomjaj!) in some volume of HolQeD as such? I doubt it.
That is his reading of Okrand's rather vague text. It's about as plausible
as another.
>>> (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.
This is another one of those terminology problems. Phonemes are what the
language makes of them. Sometimes they're compound (e.g. affricates), but
the language perceives them as elemental (even if the elements also exist
separately). You can call things what you want, but the result is the
same. There are perspectives from which it makes a difference, but we
don't know enough about Klingon to get to them at this point. For
simplicity and to conform to the orthography, we tend to consider "rgh" as
a consonant cluster. But it needn't be necessarily so. Perhaps, as was
suggested, "aw" et al are really diphthongs, considered vocalic, and the
only consonant allowed after them is '. In which case you can consider
"ar" et al also to be diphthongs (so what if r doesn't occur as a vowel?
Maybe it's only a semivowel), and, following macheq's argument (which
really is interesting), the ' which is the only consonant allowed after it
gets voiced and turns into gh. It could be. But the end result, so far as
we understand the language now, is the same.
~mark
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