tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jun 10 16:01:52 2002
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Re: klingon letters
> > for curiosity: isn't it strange that the klingon transcription in
> > english has "D", "S", "I" without any "d", "s", or "i"?
> > why do you use capital letters at all (you could use "x" instead of
> > "H", "k" instead of "Q", "z" instead of "tlh" or something like that)?
DloraH:
>uppercase?... The dictionary was written for American actors. Some of the
>sounds are similar to how we already say them; w is w, n is n. Some of the
>sounds are only slightly different; using uppercase flags these sounds as
>being
>different from how we normally pronounce them. D is not the same why we say
>d. Sure Okrand could have used d instead of D, but then people would
>forget to
>pronounce it differently.
Exactly. Okrand uses upper-case D, S, I and Q as a reminder to the actors
- and only later Klingonists like us - that these phonemes are not
articulated the same as the same letters in English. Okrand was limited
for practical reasons to the symbols on a standard US typewriter keyboard,
so he couldn't use the more precise International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
preferred by linguists. BTW, using upper case letters like this is common
in other non-IPA phonetic systems. I've seen several schemes for
transcribing Arabic where velarized (or "dark") and other contrasting
consonants are represented using upper-case: t/T, d/D, z/Z, h/H, etc.
--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons