tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Nov 14 08:04:34 1996

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Re: <K'>vaD ghItlhlu''a'?

Denny Shortliffe writes:
>Linguists have a term for vowels which go together (dipthong maybe?).

I suspect that Klingon linguists would *not* have a term for vowels
which go together.  We've never seen any tlhIngan Hol words with 
adjacent vowels, and the one tool that could create one (the suffix 
{-oy}) is canonically suspected of having a {'} added before it to 
keep vowels separated.  Do you know what two fricatives in a row is 
called?  I've never needed a name for it, because I've never noticed 
it happening in English.  (Russian does it, I think: "tovarishch"?)

It's clear from inspection that each tlhIngan Hol syllable contains 
one and only one vowel.  Dipthongs do not appear.

>In
>any case, the point is that the name {mayq} doesn't end in {yq} though
>it may look like it does.  In fact, it ends in {q} since the {ay} group
>is indivisible.

There is no "{ay} group" in tlhIngan Hol.  The letter {a} is defined 
as a vowel, and the letter {y} is defined as a consonant.  In making
a distinction between the tlhIngan Hol consonant {y} and the English 
semivowel "y", I sometimes think of {y} as a voiced "h" sound (similar
to a "zh" but made with the back of the tongue instead of the front).
It's not like an English "ee"; we don't find it forming dipthongs.

Nobody claimed that "K'Pach" is a tlhIngan Hol name anyway.  It could 
easily be the Federation [mis]spelling of {qep'aj}, or {qa'pach}, or 
it could even be a formal Klingonaase corruption of {*qotlhpach}. :-)

-- ghunchu'wI'

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