tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jul 25 00:25:00 2001

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RE: Gutturals (was Re: qung "pun")

I suspect that the Klingon {Q} was invented in response to Okrand's only
specified direction given to him in any script for what Klingon was supposed
to sound like. In the script to ST3 is a director's comment, "And Kruge says
in his gutteral Klingon..." Okrand has made several references to this point
in conversations about the language at public appearances.

Basically, he started with the words (and the sounds in those words) in ST1,
which were made up before Okrand became involved in the language. He knew
this was not a sufficiently broad set of phonemes, so he made up more,
keeping in mind that Klingon was supposed to be "gutteral". Going back to an
early HolQeD article I wrote about this, I said:

**************************************************
We can see that a very interesting quantity of information was gathered from
these first few lines originally improvised by the actor, then codified into
TKD and built upon. First, let's look at the phonemes. Those used by these
lines that were the foundation of the language: a b ch e gh H I j S t u w y
'. Of these, e, j, o and t are questionable interpretations of sounds made
in ST1.

Mr. Okrand has remarked several times that he felt this was not a complete
set of phonemes for a language. He filled it in with: D l m n ng o p q Q r
tlh v (and possibly e, j, o and t).
**************************************************

Note that {Q} is among those phonemes he added, and it is certainly the most
gutteral one in the language.

charghwI'

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rohan Fenwick [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Monday, July 23, 2001 11:45 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Gutturals (was Re: qung "pun")
>
>
> Oh dear, oh dear, oh deary me. I have been pronouncing the <<gh>>
> and <<H>>
> as UVULAR fricatives (by analogy with <<q>> and <<Q>>). Looks
> like I'll have
> to overhaul my pronunciation :)
>
> BTW, I read somewhere the other day that the only languages to possess
> uvular affricates such as that found in Klingon <<Q>> are Nez Perce,
> Kabardian and Wolof. Does anyone have any further information
> regarding this
> and whether the Klingon affricate may have been borrowed from a certain
> language, or is this fact just one of those snippets I should file under
> "interesting but useless information"?
>
> Qapla' 'ej Satlho'
>
> ro'Han
>
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>

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