tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Sep 06 19:25:21 1997
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Re: KLBC: Apostrophes at the beginning of words
- From: Qov <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: KLBC: Apostrophes at the beginning of words
- Date: Sat, 6 Sep 1997 19:25:16 -0700 (PDT)
At 11:49 AM 9/6/97 -0700, Peter Schuller wrote:
>I've finally got TKD, and I'm sure I'll have lots of questions about
>tlhIngan in the near future (I've got one already) so I thought I'd
>introduce myself. Unfortunately it'll have to be in English since as
>I said, I just got TKD and I've just began to learn...
maj. batlh yIghoj.
>How are you suppose to pronounce the apostrophes when they're at
>the beginning of words? TKD doesn't say.
I'm going to paste in most of a previous answer to this question, because
I'm lazy, and the answer hasn't changed:
The {'} is pronounced the same way anywhere in a word: a glottal stop.
But don't worry about twisting your throat to make some weird new sound at
the beginning of a word like {'In}. English speakers automatically start
bare vowels
with a glottal stop. Say out loud the English words "bin" and "in"
and pay particular attention to what the very back of your
tongue does as you start the "i" in each word. As you say the bare
vowel on "in" the back of your tongue rises slightly in a a way it
does not do inside the word "bin."
If you have the a microphone and sound sampling software try sampling and
playing backwards the word "oboe" to hear the difference between {'obo} and
{obo'}. Not sure if this will work, let me know, someone, if it helps.
English speakers actually have great trouble learning to *not* to
put a glottal stop before bare vowels, but fortunately for us, no
Klingon syllable starts with one.
I'm going to assume the same is true for Swedish, unless one of our resident
linguists contradicts me.
Qov ([email protected])
Beginners' Grammarian