tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Jan 04 14:54:13 1997

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RE: ' between vowels



 January 04, 1997 4:20 AM, jatlh 'Iwvan:

> Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
> 
> [re {ta-DI-'oS} vs *{ta-DI'-oS}]
> > I suppose you could work at making the syllable break
> > noticeable, but most of the time I doubt it would be.
> 
> In phonology there is something known as the Maximal Onset Principle,
> which says that in any spoken language words are divided into syllables
> in such a way that as many consonants as possible form a syllable with
> the following rather than the preceding vowel.  A corollary is that a
> single intervocalic consonant always goes with the following vowel,
> because a syllable can always begin with a single consonant.

I have a warning to give here.  There are cases where Marc Okrand has gone out 
of his way to avoid emulating Terran languages.  Just because all natural 
Earth languages follow a rule, it does not follow that Klingon will.  It is an 
artificial language (or, in the fiction of Star Trek, a non-human language), 
and may differ from human language tendencies.  The prime example of this is 
the set of color words {Doq} and {SuD}.  See HolQeD 5:2: "Klingon Colours," by 
Nick Nicholas.

-- 
SuStel
Beginners' Grammarian
Stardate 97012.9


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