tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Mar 10 12:12:26 1999
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RE: Klingon Phonetics
- From: "Andeen, Eric" <[email protected]>
- Subject: RE: Klingon Phonetics
- Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 13:15:13 -0700
jatlh John:
> nuqneH tlhIngan Hol jatlhwI'
> My name is John and I'm a student of linguistics.
Greetings, John. My name is pagh, and I am currently the Beginners'
Grammarian for the list. It's my job to help beginners learn Klingon.
Whenever you have a post you want help with, mark it for my attention with a
KLBC in the subject line.
I am not, however, a linguist, and I don't even play one on TV. I will
therefore leave most of the linguistics questions to the experts (and we do
have a few of them here).
> I see that there is no shortage of grammarians in this group, but I'm
> hoping that there are some phoneticians, as well.
>
> A few questions:
>
> 1. Does assimiliation ever occur in Klingon? For example,
>
> tIjwI'ghom vIchenmoH (I form a boarding party)
>
> Would "vIchenmoH" not be realized as "vIchemmoH" or "vIchennoH" in fast
> speech? Sounds tend to assimilate to place of articulation in English. I
> was wondering if that occured in spoken Klingon, as well. Another
> example:
>
> qonbej (It is certainly recording [or some such thing])
>
> In English, a construction like "in + balance" would be realized as
> "imbalance" because of assimilation.
>
> (No Borg jokes, please.)
The short answer is no. We don't have any written or spoken examples of it.
The longer answer is a bit more complicated. Since Klingon is not spoken all
that often, and there are no native speakers, it's hard to get a feel for
what everyday spoken Klingon sounds like. I suspect a few sounds may be
affected in some regions, but I doubt there is anything widespread.
> 2. Klingon has a restriction that only one consonent can occur in the
> coda (the end of a syllable), with the exception of the common "rgh"
> construction ["ghargh" (worm) and many others]. Why is it then that when
> Klingson borrowed "Picard" from English, it became "pIcarD"?
Actually, there are three exceptions: <rgh>, <y'>, and <w'>. As for Picard's
name - I don't know. Even in English, borrowed words (especially recent
ones) seem to be fairly arbitrary. Most likely the first Klingon to use
Picard's name widely within the Empire spoke good Federation standard and
didn't have any trouble with the <rD>.
pagh
Beginners' Grammarian