tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Mar 11 08:09:17 1999
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Re: Klingon Phonetics
According to Alan Anderson:
>
> 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.
I agree completely.
> Klingon morphemes are generally pronounced with a very
> careful separateness. They're more akin to separate words in English.
I think this is the point. In English, the unit of meaning is
the word. We do have suffixes and prefixes that sort of change
the meaning, but in essence, these create whole new words and
the combinations are somewhat limited. The grammar limits the
combinations of words into specific phrases such that in
English, the assimmilation can extend to eliminate whole
syllables and even whole words. "Jeet jet?" "Did you eat yet?"
"Chup too?" "What are you up to?"
We have a LOT of unique syllables and we combine them in a
limited number of ways. By comparison, Klingon and many
agglutenative languages have fewer unique syllables and combine
them in more complex, meaningful ways.
In Cherokee, the unit of meaning is the syllable. Any root word
can take on any combination of many different affixes, building
the meaning of the word. It is this structure of a limited set
of syllables combined in uniquely meaningful ways that makes
Cherokee able to use a syllabary instead of an alphabet. The
written characters represent whole syllables instead of vowels
and consonants. There are (I think) 88 syllables in Cherokee.
That's it. It becomes very important to be able to distinguish
those syllables, and so one of the most universally observed
characteristics of Cherokee is that Cherokee speakers speak
slowly and carefully. Always. Or they remain silent.
Were that I adopted those traits...
The most interesting example I know in Cherokee is that one of
their syllables is "S". It never joins with the syllable before
or after it. It is its own syllable. In the Cherokee tapes I've
heard, the speaker clearly finishes one syllable, then hisses
and then there is an equally minute pause before pronouncing
the next syllable. It is the only syllable in Cherokee which
has no vowel. They treat it as if it WERE a vowel. The other
syllables are all either lone vowels or consonants followed by
vowels. Their word for "Cherokee" is Tsa-la-gee and is
pronounce as if it were three words in English. Words are
separated by even longer pauses.
It takes patience to listen to Cherokee.
> 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.
That is a classic divider between people who speak Klingon vs.
those who someone taught a phrase or two. Just get them to say
{Qapla'}. If they say, {Qap-la'} they usually speak Klingon. If
they say {Ka-plaa}, then they learned it from TV.
> 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'}.
{jabbI'ID} is a good example, since it is a unique, unvarried
collection of syllables with one meaning, and it doesn't sound
like anything else. That doesn't happen much in Klingon, but
where it does is where I'd expect this kind of blending of
consonants to occur first and most.
> >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?
I doubt it.
> >(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.)
Thanks. I was wondering how long this thread would go on before
someone pointed that out. There are further restrictions on
{w'}, but I won't go into that... Get the back issue of HolQeD
volume 1 number 1. You'll love it.
> >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'
Besides, his elocution is notorious, so why not be careful
about pronouncing his name?
charghwI' 'utlh