tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun May 25 13:52:20 2003
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Re: the glottal stop
- From: "Sangqar (Sean Healy)" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: the glottal stop
- Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 18:45:42 +0000
jIjatlh:
> > In my dialect, 'h' is a separate sound, not merely the lack of a
> > glottal stop. Consider the sentences 'he eats' and 'he heats'. In my
> > dialect, there is no glottal stop in either sentence, and yet the
> > words 'eats' and 'heats' are easily distinguishable.
>[snip]
> > In the sentence 'I ate an apple', only the first vowel has a glottal
> > stop in front of it (in my dialect).
jatlh David:
>Hmm. When I talk, I very definitely put a stop before "eats" in the
>first phrase. In the second, I *think* I put stops before "I", "ate",
>and "apple". I seem to leave the stop out before "an".
jatlh DloraH:
>If you slur your words together into an almost single word and talk in a
>manner that a class on affective communication teaches not to do, then
>sure,
>you drop all those glottals. But if you talk in a clear, understandable
>manner, the glottals are there.
When I hear glottals in all those positions, it reminds me of:
1) A child learning to read, sounding each word out.
2) A non-native speaker who doesn't have the proper suprasegmentals.
3) Someone deliberately pronouncing a series of individual words, rather
than a single cohesive sentence, a la: I. Ate. An. Apple.
Under ordinary circumstances, I would have a hard time understanding someone
like (3) above, since his sentences would not flow. (Well, maybe not with
this particular short example, but with extended dialogue, it would be
harder to keep up.) However, the next time I hear a public speaker, I will
listen more closely to his use of glottal stops. If he can manage to use
them in positions like I have exemplified above, and at the same time not
sound stilted, I will be impressed.
Placing a glottal stop in 'he eats' does not sound particularly stilted,
perhaps because both words have the same vowel. But glottal stops
everywhere in 'I ate an apple' does sound stilted.
jatlh David:
>I see your point, though. When words are chained together, the "h" is
>more than a mere lack of a glottal stop.
It's easy to produce the 'h' sound by itself. It's not a lack of anything.
It's its own phoneme.
>When a word is in isolation,
>however, I'd say that an English word starting with a vowel has an
>implicit glottal stop preceding it.
No doubt about it. It's a well-documented phenomenon.
>Further, that any word that starts
>with a vowel needs either a puff of air (an "h") or a glottal stop to
>get an air flow going that the vowel can modulate.
In English, yes, an word in isolation cannot start with a pure vowel sound.
In some languages, the glottal stop is phonemic - a word can start with a
pure vowel or a glottal stop.
I taught a friend of mine,who has a Master's in Linguistics, a few Finnish
phrases. The other day he was practicing them, and even though he got all
the sounds right, it still didn't sound right. It didn't flow. He said it
was an issue of improper suprasegmentals. I wonder what suprasegmentals
there are in Klingon. What makes a Klingon sentence sound like a sentence
rather than a series of individual words?
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