tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Apr 12 12:05:05 1997
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Re: pronunciation of tlh-H
ja' Banzai:
>I have heard from one source (who's reliability I am not sure of) that
>Okrand "borrowed" the sounds of the Klingon alphabet from known terran
>languages. Can anyone confirm this source?
Whether or not the sounds were intentionally taken from existing
languages, there was one large constraint on which sounds could be
used. They had to be spoken by human actors who weren't trained
linguists, and who for the most part spoke only English! That's
going to limit the options a bit -- few actors can use a belch as
a phoneme, for example. The script called for a "gutteral tongue",
and Okrand decided to make use of the Klingon sounds that were
heard at the beginning of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" (which
were devised by James Doohan and spoken by Mark Lenard through a
set of prosthetic teeth).
Given that most sounds that can be made by the human voice have
been used in one natural language or another, it's not surprising
that one can find examples of Klingon phonemes in "known terran
languages". (Can anyone tell me of a "terran" language that has
the Klingon {Q} sound?)
-- ghunchu'wI'