tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jan 05 00:31:55 1997

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Re: ' between vowels



David Trimboli wrote:
>  January 04, 1997 4:20 AM, jatlh 'Iwvan:
> >
> > 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.
> 
> I have a warning to give here.  There are cases where Marc Okrand
> has gone out of his way to avoid emulating Terran languages.

SaghuHnISmoH je jIH.  tera' Hol 'oHbe' tlhIngan Hol'e', 'ach 'oHDaq
qaSlaH Hoch Doch net ngoDvammo' neH HarlaHbe'.

> Just because all natural Earth languages follow a rule, it does not
> follow that Klingon will.

`all natural Earth languages' vIjatlhbe', `all spoken languages' vIjatlh.
This excludes the various sign languages,

> It is an artificial language (or, in the fiction of Star Trek,
> a non-human language), and may differ from human language tendencies.

Quite true, but there have got to be ways in which it may and ways
in which it mayn't.  <nuq nuq?> yu'lu'chugh, DaH janglaHchu' pagh;
'ach luSov luneHmo', Holmey lInglu'bogh poj Holtej law'.
(The question is which are which; no exhaustive answer can be given
to that at the present moment, but it is what feeds many linguists'
interest in constructed languages.)

> The prime example of this is the set of color words {Doq} and {SuD}.

qaSmeH ghu'vetlh meq tu'nISlu', qar'a'?  nIchyon jabbI'ID vIlaDpu'be'.
'ach chaq bochtaHvIS tera' Hov'a' rapbe' Qo'noS Hovtay' botlh.  chaq
tera'ngan mInDu' rurbe' tlhIngan mInDu'.  (rapchuqbe' je Hoch Human
mInDu': pIm _red_ _green_ je 'e' leghbe' _daltonist_pu'.)

'ach Human nuj teS je wuv'a' Human Holmey _phonotactics_?  As long as
a language has vowels and consonants, and the sort of sequences that
they form in Klingon, can it have a different sort of syllable structure?
vISovchu'be', 'ach vIHonqu'.  chaq pImqu' qIbmey, 'ach DatDaq 4 = 2+2;
chaq pImqu' yoqpu' porghDu', 'ach not yoq Qup mojtaHbogh yoq qan tu'lu'.
There are things that can't help being universal, whether or not the
MOP is one of them.

--'Iwvan

-- 
"mIw'e' lo'lu'ta'bogh batlh tlhIHvaD vIlIH [...]
 poH vIghajchugh neH jIH, yab boghajchugh neH tlhIH"
                                  (Lewis Carroll, "_Snark_ wamlu'")
Ivan A Derzhanski  <[email protected], [email protected]>
Dept for Math Lx,  Inst for Maths & CompSci,  Bulg Acad of Sciences
Home:  cplx Iztok  bl 91,  1113 Sofia,  Bulgaria


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