tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Apr 03 21:46:25 1997
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Re: whispering?
> qoror here. Are any professionals around able to speak tlhIngan Hol
>whispering? It's really hard, I've noticed. Does anybody know a method?
I can whisper the sounds of tlhIngan Hol with no problem whatsoever.
It's no harder than whispering any other language that has voiced and
unvoiced versions of the same sounds.
However, I've never tried to *understand* any whispered tlhIngan Hol!
It's probably a little easier than understanding most other languages
since there are so few voiced/unvoiced phoneme pairs in Klingon.
The worst ambiguity I hear is between {j} and {ch}. {p} and {b} can
be distinguished with practice in mixing a little {m} with the {b},
and making sure the {p} is pronounced with a distinct "pop". {t} and
{D} are quite different, even when whispered. {gh} and {H} are hard
to distinguish unless I use an artificial low/high pitch difference.
{m} and {n} and {ng} sound almost identical to me when I don't voice
them. I can hear a slight difference when I compare them one right
after another, but I don't think I could identify which is which in
isolation.
A fluent speaker of English has little difficulty understanding when
listening to whispered English, even with the loss of information as
"z" and "s" merge, "t" and "d" become indistinguishable, and so on.
Understanding spoken language isn't a sequential process of hearing
the sounds, identifying the phonemes, assembling them into words, and
understanding the meaning. It's a lot more high-level than that. A
fluent speaker of tlhIngan Hol would likewise have little difficulty
understanding it when it's whispered.
-- ghunchu'wI'