tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Aug 05 23:49:40 2001
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Re: Gutturals
- From: "Rohan Fenwick" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Gutturals
- Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2001 03:49:39
Unfortunately, my Klingon is not up to discussing phonemes and phonetics -
forgive me for my not speaking Klingon this time.
jatlh Nick:
>gh is a voiced velar fricative.
Not having PK or CK to go on, i guessed from the audio file at the KLI and
the description of the phoneme. As it turns out, I guessed wrong :)
>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.
qatlho'.
>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),
To be truthful, I'm actually familiar with the phoneme sets of six major
Caucasian languages - Abaza, Abkhaz, Ubykh, Kabardian, Georgian and
Tabassaran - and the funny thing is, even though Abkhaz has more phonemes
than you can poke two sticks at, and Ubykh supposedly sounds like pebbles on
the floor, Kabardian is *still* the only one with the uvular affricate... ;)
>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.
Nez Perce is/was spoken in the northeast of the United States and
south-eastern Canada. I'm not sure about its current status.
>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,
Agreed. And it works, too; when I practise speaking Klingon for long
periods, I have to have cold water handy...
>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
Most dialects of Arabic have [q].
>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_.
Bring on the butter menthol! :)
>Nick Nicholas, TLG, UCI, USA. [email protected]
Qapla' 'ej Satlho'
ro'Han
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