tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Apr 17 10:25:42 1997

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Re: pronunciation of tlh-H

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>Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 15:15:21 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Mark Beal <[email protected]>
>
>I know I'm new to this list, and it isn't really my place to disagree, or
>what ever, but.  Surely it is BETTER that Okrand SAID that he has
>'Borrowed' some sound from other languages, rather than just using them,
>and claiming that HE made them up??  There have been many Terren languages,
>and it is, as ppl have pointed out, very likely anyway that some sound have
>been used before, and if you think about it, if the sounds haven't been
>used before, then their probably VERY hard for a Terran to say. I think
>that at the least, if Okrand was going to 'steal' sounds, then at least he
>took the most strange ones from VERY old languages. 

Okrand is a well-informed linguist, and anyone in his position would
certainly have enough grounding in phonetics to know quite well how various
language-families around the world use sounds and would know that they're
used (he told me, for example, that his original work in tlhIngan Hol used
not the orthography we use, but the International Phonetic Alphabet.  It's
pretty hard to know how to use the IPA and not realize that there are
languages out there that use all the sounds it encodes).

I wouldn't say that these sounds are "VERY hard" for people to say.
Speakers of the languages they come from probably don't think so!  They say
them every day (and there are FAR weirder ones.  Be thankful Klingon
doesn't have implosives, ejectives, or clicks!  All its sounds are
pulmonic).  In some cases, the way they are combined in Klingon *is* hard
to say (and not found in existing languages), but the individual
phonemes... well, people apparently can get used to just about anything.

>One point this raises, IMO, is this: Did Okrand think of a sound, tlh, and
>then find out that there was an aztec sound that was/is simmilar, or did he
>just find a cool aztec sound, and THEN put it into his language?

Okrand's field of expertise is Native American languages.  That's where he
did his doctoral work, etc.  I don't think he could possibly have gotten
his degree without knowing that Aztec (or SOME language) has a "tlh"
sound.  (You don't even have to go to Nahuatl/Aztec for something similar;
Welsh has the sound written "ll" which is very much like the "lh" part of
"tlh", and that's still in current use.  Just ask anyone in Llandudno or
Llangollen or Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
[sorry, I *had* to write that]).

Phonetics, while perhaps not COMPLETELY understood to every last detail, is
really a quite well-explored area of linguistics.  Linguists learn early on
how diverse phoneme-stocks can be.

~mark

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