tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Mar 10 22:15:07 1999
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Re: Klingon Phonetics
ja' "John Bowman" <[email protected]>:
>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:
If it occurred in spoken Klingon, nobody here would be able to understand
the speaker well. Klingon morphemes are generally pronounced with a very
careful separateness. They're more akin to separate words in English. I
know *I* take great care to speak the words exactly as they are spelled.
We usually recognize that the spelling we use is intended as representing
the pronunciation, so we try hard not to be lazy with that pronunciation.
Even in a word like {Qapla'}, I try to keep the syllables separate and to
keep the {p} and {l} from blending. The closest thing to assimilation in
my speech is the occasional lazy pronunciation of a doubled consonant, as
in the words {jabbI'ID} or {'aDDu'}.
>In English, a construction like "in + balance" would be realized as
>"imbalance" because of assimilation.
Klingon morphemes are so short that any such assimilation is likely to
yield another word with a drastically different meaning. Do natural
agglutinative languages experience assimilation as much as English does?
>(No Borg jokes, please.)
Aww, you're no fun. :-)
>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].
There isn't any actual "restriction" given anywhere. It's just an
observation about the vocabulary. (And there are also {w'} and {y'}
clusters seen at the end of syllables.)
>Why is it then that when
>Klingson borrowed "Picard" from English, it became "pIcarD"?
It's not a "borrowed" word like {nughI'} or {qa'vIn}. It's a proper
name, and it seems clear that care was taken to preserve the "native"
pronunciation of it. He's an important person. After all, he *did*
act as Arbiter of Succession for the Leader of the High Council. :-)
-- ghunchu'wI'