tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jun 23 15:29:59 2009

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Re: Klingon orthography

David Trimboli ([email protected]) [KLI Member] [Hol po'wI']

Michael Everson wrote:
> On 23 Jun 2009, at 21:20, David Trimboli wrote:
> 
>> Okrand only goes out of his way to use "nonstandard" roman letters
>> when he is talking about accents. At time time the letters are
>> more like phones. Most of the time we just get the normal phonemes.
>> But he doesn't indicate this difference in the system. When he
>> describes {baH} as sounding like {maH}, where curly brackets
>> indicate the text as we're shown it, what he means is that /baH/
>> (showing the phonemes) is realized as [maH] (showing the phones
>> using the phoneme system). When he gives us things like {U} or {s}
>> or {h}, those aren't phonemes, they're phones. All of this gets
>> mixed up into what gets published.
> 
> No, when he writes the words in KGT he writes them in the same bold
> face that he uses for other orthographic forms. {U} and {s} and {h}
> may be non-standard language, but the orthographic forms are within
> the parameters of the standard system. A revised Latin orthography
> for Klingon should also have the facility to indicate these.

Yes, that's what I mean.

I would also point out—completely tangentially to the topic—that TKD 
mentions that pIqaD "seems to be well suited to the various dialects." 
That's pIqaD, and not the roman transcription characters used by the 
Federation Scientific Research Council (Okrand), so it's not 
particularly relevant.

>> If we WERE to alter the way we write Klingon using non-Klingon 
>> characters, we'd first have to decide at what level we wanted to
>> work. Phonemic? Phonetic? Something in between? We'd also have to
>> decide how much weight we'd give to Okrand's pronunciations, or
>> some actors' pronunciations, compared to what we're TOLD.
> 
> These are rather interesting questions. My assumption has been to
> take Standard Klingon as Okrand gives it, with due respect to the
> fact that the pronunciation he gives is the pronunciation that most
> Klingonists strive for. (The actors are as we know often less than
> successful.) The deviations, dialectal or generational, are as Okrand
> describes them.

Okrand himself doesn't always follow his own pronunciation rules. Stress 
often differs from TKD 1.3, but we're warned that the rules given there 
are very simplistic and not always followed. But Klingon /r/ is 
described as "lightly trilled," and Okrand pronounces them that way, but 
he returns to his usual retroflex approximant (which is, I believe, the 
technical term for an "American r") whenever he pronounces Klingon /rgh/.

-- 
SuStel
Stardate 9478.2

tlhIngan Hol MUSH: http://trimboli.name/mush

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