tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jan 06 08:20:09 2004
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Re: KLBC your choice of a name
On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 09:06:51AM -0500, Scott Willis wrote:
> I'll answer this one first, in English. In Klingon, there are some sounds
> that are represented by consonant clusters: {tlh}, {gh}, {ch}, and {ng}.
Technically, the term "consonant cluster" refers to sounds, not orthography.
The above aren't clusters, but digraphs (or, in the case of <tlh>,
a trigraph): single consonants represented by more than one letter.
> When Philip pointed out that {gr} is illegal for a normal Klingon
> word, he was pointing out that {gr} is not one of these clusters.
Well, the combination <gr> is not valid tlhIngan Hol, since <g>
by itself is not a letter in the writing system; it can only
appear as the first half of the letter <gh> or the last half of
the letter <ng>.
The symbolically valid combination <ghr> is not a legal way to
start a Klingon syllable, however. In general, a Klingon syllable has to
start with a single consonant sound (which may be represented by two
or three letters, but that's just a quirk of the writing system).
Now, clusters of two consonants together occur all the time
in the *middle* of words, when the end of one syllable bumps up against
the beginning of another. In that case you can see <ghr> in words like
{Heghrup} "ready to die". Also, since some consonant clusters are legal
at the *end* of a syllable, you can even get clusters of three consonants
in a row that way, as in {lurghraj} "y'all's direction" (in the sense of
"toward y'all", not in the sense of "y'all's instructions").
-marqoS
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