tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Aug 04 17:38:46 2001
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Re: Gutturals
- From: Nick Nicholas <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Gutturals
- Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2001 14:37:56 -0700
Yes, I should have answered a lot more a lot earlier, but those in the know
know why I haven't. Just quickly:
tlhIngan-Hol Digest 24 Jul 2001 08:00:00 -0000 Issue 1975
gutturals:
gh is a voiced velar fricative. I wouldn't have thought there's any
controversy about that. But the voiced counterpart of IPA [x] is not IPA
[c-cedilla] (Marc Ruehlaender already pointed this out), but IPA [gamma].
I can see how thinking it was palatal would make for some very wacky
phonotactics; then again, the insistence on fronting velars before front
vowels is hardly a universal. Consider for example the Spanish
pronunciation of Los Angeles, which I have considerable trouble with.
As some of you know, my Klingon pronunciation also has considerable
problems. :-) Pronouncing HI' as a palatal is not, to my knowledge, one of
them. This is odd, given that I'm a native speaker of Greek (which very
much uses the "ich-laut"), and that I routinely use the palatal in Lojban.
I think the difference is that the Klingon front vowels are lax, so I don't
associate them with Greek vowels. In fact, as some of you know, they are
*over*-lax (my _I_ keeps going past IPA [I], and ends up some kind of
mid-high central. As I like to say: my Lojban sounds Greek; my Klingon
sounds New Zealandish.)
Lucky for me Greek has IPA [gamma], eh? :-)
We already know, from KGT, that young persons' Klingon has some rudimentary
phonological transformations; dropping gemination (consonant doubling) for
one.
Nez Perce, Kabardian and Wolof are not the only languages in the world with
Klingon _Q_ (IPA [q chi]); but they are the only languages with it in Iain
Maddieson's survey _Sounds of the World's Languages_ (or whatever --- just
search for Maddieson), which includes something like 200 or 500 languages,
chosen as randomly as possible. The SIL Ethnologue (which is online) counts
something like 5000 languages, though it is notorious for readily splitting
up languages that most people would (for non-linguistic reasons) call
dialects. What this means in effect is, if you're looking for _Q_, the best
places in the world to look are the Caucasus (where everything wacky and
guttural lives), West Africa, and the the indigenous languages of the U.S.
(I used to remember where Nez Perce was/is spoken, since the tidbit comes
from me, but I have forgotten.) And if you look, you will find more. As it
happens, I haven't.
Okrand, of course, included [q chi] not because he had any special affinity
with Nez Perce, but because [q chi] is the guttural sound par excellence,
and he wanted Klingon sounding guttural. The interesting thing is, Anglo
culture has certain negative connotations built up around guttural
languages, which the Klingon mythos clearly exploits; but none of the
languages Anglos have had significant exposure to have [q chi]. The
languages in question are, of course, German and Arabic; if I'm not
mistaken, some variants of Arabic have [q], but not [q chi] --- when Arabic
goes guttural with its fricatives, it does it further back in the throat.
Yes, it is possible to go further back in the throat than Klingon _Q_.
Sad thing is, phonology is not my thing; but I didn't really have much
constructive to offer on negation. The static position of -Qo' and -Ha'
makes for rampant ambiguity, and you just learn to accept that. -be' is
flexible in position, and my impression is that flexibility is exploited;
but I have not been in close enough touch with Klingon usage in recent
years to confirm that. (And in Hamlet, the position of -be' was as often
dictated by metre as by semantics. :-) .)
Nick Nicholas, TLG, UCI, USA. [email protected] www.opoudjis.net
"Most Byzantine historians felt they knew enough to use the optatives
correctly; some of them were right." --- Harry Turtledove.