tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Feb 05 02:33:26 2011

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Re: tato'eba' yImuv 'ej mu'tlheghmey tImugh!

Andrà MÃller ([email protected])



2011/2/5 Robyn Stewart <[email protected]>
> At 15:02 04/02/2011, you wrote:
> > > That would be a known and previously problematic
> > > Canadian/US "o" difference. My spelling was
> > > derived from listening to the clip several times,
> > > not looking at the transliteration. When I say
> > > poS and American will hear puS, even though I
> > > pronounce the o in poS the same way I pronounce
> > > the o in mosaic. Seeing as Okrand is American,
> > > I'd better go with American ears, though.
> > >
> >
> >Well, it doesn't have to do with ears but rather with the mouth. 中 is
> >pronounced with a [u] or [Ã?Å ] (full IPA:
> >[Ã?Ë?Ã?¡Ã?â??uÃ?â?¹ ~ Ã?Ë?Ã?¡Ã?â??Ã?Å Ã?â?¹]. The spelling is
> >missleading. There's no "o" sound in the first syllable. I didn't hear any
> >Chinese dialect pronounce it with "o" either.
>
> The sound that for you falls squarely within the
> province of "u" is within the range that of "o"
> to a Canadian. We worked out back at qep'a'
> wejDIch that we draw the o/u boundary in a
> different place.  It's the reason Americans hear
> us saying aboot, and, probably, moosaic.  I'm
> accepting the American range as the Klingon one,
> but that is what is going on. Because the
> Canadian o goes that far, I hear all sounds in
> that range as o. Because the American one
> doesn't, they hear the more closed end as u.
>
>
Well, not "for me", I wasn't speaking about perception, but about actual
vowel quality, so the sound is an [u] sound, as I said. But I'm not
Canadian, so I really don't know where your <o> sound is in the vowel chart.
So yeah, maybe it's closer to IPA [u] for you (I now see that maybe my IPA
didn't get through on the mailing list). Klingon is described by an American
as having the same sound as some word with <u> in (presumably American)
English (I don't have the original dictionary with me, now), which would
correspond to [u] too, also cf.
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/klingon.htm. So Chinese "zhong" would
come quite close to {jung} in Klingon, not to
{jong}, because that syllable doesn't exist in Chinese. "Zhong" really is
just like "zhun" (Klingon {jun}), just with a different nasal at the end.

- André





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