tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Jan 04 14:54:13 1997
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RE: ' between vowels
- From: "David Trimboli" <[email protected]>
- Subject: RE: ' between vowels
- Date: Sat, 4 Jan 97 22:40:47 UT
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