tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Aug 18 10:46:17 1998

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Re: the nature of pIqaD (was Re: KLBC - attempt at translation, v 1.1)

---Rob Maqmigh  wrote:
>
> Qov wrote:
> 
> >If that was the case, the Morskan and the ta' Hol speaker would quite
> >identically have to memorize the different 'spellings,' just as they
> >would have to memorize ever other symbol.  The fact that it's the
> >*Morskan* who has to do extra work because of his pronunciation
> >difference strongly implies to me that pIqaD shows pronunciation.
> 
> 
> I know I'm not an expert in Klingon. (I'm really barely learning it so
> far.) But wouldn't this be more like English? With the word "sore",
for
> instance, If you were in Boston, It would be pronounced "saw". In
> Florida it would be pronounced "soar". Both places spell it with an
"r"
> but people in Boston just pronounce it different. They don't have to
> work harder, they just know the difference. Do you think that this is
> the same way it would be done in Klingon? I don't think that the
> different dialect has to work harder at it, they just know the
> differance. What do you think?

What you suggest would appear to be what happens when a Morskan
speaker reads the pIqaD equivalent of /SoH/.  For him or her, whatever
queues the ta' Hol speaker to say /H/ doesn't signal that sound, and
so s/he just reads it so it sounds like /So/.  And you're right,
speakers of different dialacts would just accept it as the way things
were.  I wouldn't be surprised to see bad Morskan spellers leaving off
whatever it is that queues the final /H/ from readers of other
dialects, though.

The case I was referring to was where Mark Okrand specifically said
that speakers of a given dialect have to memorize the spelling
difference between two identically sounding words.  My father was an
immigrant from England and he pronounced "Mary" "merry" and "marry"
all quite distinctly.  I could hear the difference, but I didn't learn
to produce it when I speak.  For my dad they three different sounds
had three different words.  For a native Canadian English speaker they
were three different words all pronounced the same, and the different
spellings just something to memorize.  Perhaps 'work harder' is an
exaggeration, but don't you notice people making errors where they
choose the wrong word from a set that are pronounced the same way,
like break/brake to/too/two it's/its? 

I do know that historical spelling errors are one of the things that
linguists look at to track pronunciation changes in a language.

But all this is silly speculation.  Go memorize the verb prefixes.  At
least we KNOW them. :)
==

Qov - Beginners' Grammarian

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