tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Dec 08 08:43:29 2008
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RE: KLBC: New to the List
Ted William:
>I do have a question specifically about the marking of diphthongs and
>vowels at the end of words. In creating my own {mu'ghom}, I noticed an in
>consistancy on how diphthongs are marked. As I came accross {HItuy}:
>"dictatorship" in TKD, I was surprised by the lack of a glottal stop. All
>the diphthongs I have seen so far (limited though my vocabulary is) seem to
>all be followed by {'} when the diphthong comes at the end of a word. Is
>there specific rhyme or reason to the presence or absence of the glottal
>stop?
ter'eS BG:
>> The short answer is that a word has a glottal stop if Marc Okrand
>> gave it one when he made it up.
If there is a system, it's part of Okrand's personal "feel" for the language.
FYI here are some contrasting pairs:
Duy agent, emissary (n.)
Duy' defect (n.)
Duy' be defective (v.)
'uy press down (v.)
'uy' million (bound morpheme in complex nouns)
Suy merchant
Suy' shooy (type of animal) KGT
Okrand does stress the need for proper pronunciation in _Klingon for the Galactic Traveller_ (KGT):
Calling someone a {Suy'} is quite derogatory, comparable
to using the word "pig" in Federation Standard. Mistakenly
calling someone a {Suy} (merchant) when the intent is to
be insulting and call him or her a {Suy'} will have the
effect of making the speaker appear to be foolish and,
therefore, weak and hardly in a position to be ridiculing
someone else. [KGT p. 196]
>Likewise, when a vowel ends a word, more often than not a glottal stop
>follows, but with a few notable excetions, such as {ghu}: "baby" or
>{HaSta}: "visual display". I have noticed that with the conjunctive {je}
>and its counterpart {'ej}, the glottal stop is lacking after {je}, leading
>me to believe that a Klingon word per se does not require a glottal stop
>acting to complete the syllable, but one IS required preceeding a vowel to
>initiate a syllable. Is that correct?
>> There also is no correlation between words that end in vowels
>> versus the glottal stop or any other consonant.
Some more pairs:
He course, route (n.)
He' smell, emit odor (v.)
ghu baby (n.)
ghu' situation (n.)
Hu zoo (n.)
Hu' days ago (n.)
lu fall (suffer loss of status), fall from power (v.)
lu' Yes! Okay! OK! I will! (excl.)
yu first (and last) tone of nonatonic musical scale
yu' question, interrogate (v.)
>> For example, {je} is not related to {je'} any more than it's
>> related to {jen} or {jeD}. They're all separate words, one
>> of which just happens to be CV and not CVC.
je also, and, too (conj.)
je' feed (someone else) (v.)
je' buy, purchase (v.)
There's a curious twist to final {-je}/{je'} - the noun {'awje'}:
A popular effervescent drink, black in color, is called {'awje'}.
This is frequently, though not accurately, translated as "root
beer," probably because of its superficial resemblance to the
Federation soft drink, but it is made from, among other things,
the marrow ({melchoQ}) taken from the bones of a {teghbat}
(teg'bat). It is considered relatively mild, even for a Klingon
nonalcoholic drink. [KGT p.95]
This is, of course, another of Okrand's puns: {A W je'} < "A and W" (an American brand of root beer)! Note that when he created the noun, it acquired a glottal stop /'/ at the end, just like the other two known nouns ending in {-je'}:
HIvje' drinking vessel (drinking glass, goblet, tumbler,
wineglass, mug, etc.)
mavje' liver (organ)
Doq:
>>>While there can always be new exceptions created by Okrand, he
>>>has been remarkably consistent about this. The very first issue
>>>of the Klingon newsletter described this and there hasn't been
>>>any significant reason to update the basic phonology rules
>>>described there.
>>>
>>>There have been a couple of proper names that didn't conform to
>>>this, but they have all been borrowed from other languages, like
>>>{jon luq pIqarD}.
Interestingly, the string {-arD-} is present in just one other word that I know of:
Cardassia is both {qarDaS} and {qarDaSya'}. [KGT p. 142]
Note BTW that this is another foreign proper name. This tells us that Klingons view the combination {qarD} as pronounceable, even though it doesn't appear in any native tlhIngan Hol words.
--
Voragh
Canon Master of the Klingons