[1662] in tlhIngan-Hol
piQaD, and syllable-medial glottal stops (was: This'n'that)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed Oct 13 05:52:46 1993
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@klingon.east.sun.com>
From: Nick Nicholas <nsn@mullian.ee.mu.oz.au>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@klingon.east.sun.com>
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1993 19:48:34 +1000 (GMT)
In-Reply-To: <9310130245.AA05739@codex.com> from "Captain Krankor" at Oct 12, 9
3 10:43:27 pm
To Captain Krankor respond I thus:
#nIchyonvo':
1. pIQaD and Startrek verisimulitude
(those ignoring this thread can ignore section 1)
#>To Will Martin respond I thus:
#># Without wishing a major conflict,
I'll put it down to lack of sleep ;) (and some disillusionment with the Hol,
but from the sounds of what Mark posted, things are looking up. maj! Apologies
to all who felt offended, in any case (not that Klingonic an attitude to
take, but then the tension between Klingonic and tera'ngan-ic is abundant...)
#>The details of which piQaD we use are irrelevant. The simple fact is that the
#>transilteration we have used in TKD is just that --- *a* transliteration, not
#>*the* piQaD. Arguing about different transliterations being more or less
#>Klingonic on the basis of /i/-/I/ is just silly.
#Not correct. The transliteration we have is NOT *a*
#transliteration, it is *THE* transliteration. It is the official,
#sanctioned, standard one.
This depends on your verisimilitude metric. Are you treating Klingon as a
Terran artificial language, in use by a community of StarTrek enthusiasts?
Then yes, it's THE transliteration, and proposing alternatives is Not Very
Nice (though hardly a capital crime). Are you treating a Klingon as a language
found in the field by 24th century Fed linguists? Then the case of Klingon is
exactly that with romanisations of Japanese or Chinese (or Greek, for that
matter). There may be an official Japanese transliteration (which isn't
actually used, it turns out), but, as an object of linguistic study, you'd
find a multiplicity of transliteration schemes according to the context of
use. (There is a LOT to be said for IPA Klingon. For one thing, it looks much
more successfully exotic :) ) Since the Federation linguists study Klingon
rather than communicate in it, and since presumably, as with Chinese and
Japanese on this planet, anyone wanting to immerse themselves in Klingonic
culture or using it with the natives would use pIQaD, the officialdom of the
Okrand transliteration is a moot point. Saying there is also something
inherently Klingonic being lost when "i" rather than "I" is used, or "i"
representing some 'dialectical' variation, is similarly moot.
I guess what I'm saying is that this business of official transliterations
depends on how seriously you want to take the 24th century conceit, which
I suspect to have been overdone.
#You know, when you go to France, you don't tell them it's silly to
#write a c with a thingy on it to make an s sound ("why not just use
#s? I always confuse the cedilla with a normal c, and besides, s is
#so much easier to type!").
Wrong analogy; French is already written with a Roman alphabet, so you don't
have any motivation to transliterate it into another Roman alphabet (ASCII is a
different matter, and perforce, the French on the net do use something other
than c-cedilla, though there's obvious reasons why that something else is a 'c'
rather than an 's'). It makes much less sense to argue "You know, when you go
to Japan, you don't tell them it's silly to write the romanisation 'zibun'
("it sounds like jibun --- why not just write that?")" --- because a lot of
people *do* write 'jibun', and because the Japanese in the street doesn't use
romaji to a significant extent to communicate.
This all reminds me of the cx used on the net in Esperanto (the 'official'
asciisation is ch). In any case, *shrug* there's an official transliteration,
and it's there for a reason. Great. I just think that Guido's take on
the nature of the transliteration is sounder than Will's. End of topic.
(And this is not at all just a rehash of a dead-horse (mixed metaphors R us).
There's a serious underlying issue
here --- how seriously *are* we prepared to take the 24th century conceit
in the development of this language? Because it has a direct bearing on
how and how much the language gets filled in/ evolves.)
#And, for the record, I personally tend to not read posts that
#conspicuously do the I wrong. They simply are harder for me to
#read, and I'm unwilling to put in the extra effort to read it wrong
#because somebody refused to write it right.
I think this is overkill, but hey, as you please.
2. Syllable medial glottal stops and an attempt at Klingon syllabification.
#># I also see no basis whatsoever for ignoring a glottal stop in the middl
e
#>#of a word simply because it was silent when the root word was spoken without
#>#a prefix. It was silent only because it is difficult to start a syllable wit
h
#>#a glottal stop. Just try it. I DARE you. I know. *I*'ve certainly tried.
OK, I was responding to this without having fully grokked the context, for
which I duly apologise. Now that I have:
It's confusing to speak of glottal stops here. Things might be clearer if we
substitute it by /k/. Consider 'sukad'. Is it pronounced the same as 'sukkad'?
How do you quantify the effect the 'k' has on the vowel either side? The
answer to this involves Klingonic syllabification; syllabification is different
for different languages, and I don't rememeber if TKD says anything about
double consonants. The more appropriate question is: is 'qaDDaS' pronounced
the same as 'qaDaS'? I suspect it isn't: in qaDDaS, the first 'a' would be
shorter. The alternative is phonemic ambiguity, which is not a horrible thing,
but which should be explicitly mentioned in the TKD. (And no, I don't have
access to it at the moment.) If qaDDaS != qaDaS, there is no reason to treat
'''' any different than any other stop (by phonetic Occam's razor), so Su'ar
is pronounced differently to Su''ar. A disproof would only come from... well,
Okrand's pen, I suppose; I take it we're not enthusiastic here about the
movies and TNG and the tapes as phonetic evidence, if we can attribute
mistakes to them.
This having been said:
It is *not* hard to start a syllable with a glottal stop. I can't voicemail
this, but using "uh-oh" (?V?ou), Cockney "bottle" (bo?l), and "Qapla'" (qXapla?
)
as models, it isn't that hard to come up with pronunciations for Su'|ar
(= Su' ar, cf. Suq|ar), Su|'ar (= Su 'ar, cf. Su|qar) and Su'|'ar (=Su' 'ar,
cf. Suqqar). The fact that no monosyllable starts with a bare vowel in Hol
necessitates to me that the right syllabification is Su|'ar, which syllabises
just like Su|qar: a Su'|ar syllabification shouldn't be even possible in
Klingon, if it's to be selfconsistent. (The language has no VC words [' is a
consonant], but it has VC syllables? Uh-uh. And this can't be counterargued
by saying Klingon isn't terran, because the principles to analysing
syllabification aren't terran --- they're to do with the scientific method.)
(Consider also English "super" != "soup per", "supper" != "supp per")
In other words, the glottal stop does, I believe, "go with" the second
syllable, and does not "affect" the first vowel. This is not ignoring it,
but simply resolving syllable structure.
And this statement:
#>#A glottal stop is a glottal
#>#stop anywhere except the beginning of a word, where it remains silent becaus
e
#>#Okrand said nothing about glottal STARTS.
is still incredible to me, first because it seems to be misunderstanding
what "stop" as a phonetic term means, and second because it's claiming that
a glottal stop is not a glottal stop at the beginning at the word, but silent,
i.e. elided out. Well it quite simply isn't: it's very much is pronounced,
and to speak of it being silent is dangerously misleading. "uh-oh"
transliterates to 'a'o in Klingon; you *must* hold your breath before launching
into a ''''-initial syllable in Hol. Again, I think Guido has a better case
than Will here.
(I'm interpreting Guido as saying that Su'ar is prounounced as Su 'ar, and
Will that it is pronounced as Su''ar.)
Now, if Okrand says explicitly that qaDDaS is pronounced identically to
qaDaS, then I have no case. But our understanding of the relation between
phonology and lexical compositionality would have us make qaDDaS != qaDaS
the null hypothesis.
#Astoundingly enough, wielding one's linguistic expertise like a club
#serves neither to impress nor persuade.
Tsk. Words aren't clubs to be misused, whether used with expertise or without.
A lot of misunderstandings can result from misuse of terms, and I think there
is a legitimate reason for thinking that *this* misuse can lead people to
believe that 'Iv is pronounced as /Iv/ rather than /?Iv/. Now, if you think
that, properly defused from the above context, Glottal Start is still useful,
that's fine.
#It is absolutely irrelevant that this is not a term
#sanctioned by the International Linguistic Community Of People Who
#Really Know What They're Talking About; it is a useful phrase that
#describes a useful concept.
The problem with the ILCPWRKWTTA is that they do tend to KWTTA --- though I
don't think I particularly did when I was responding to Will at 3am... *smirk*
Seriously, though, someone who's done their semester of phonetics, ceteris
paribus, will have a better take on what is essentially a phonetic question
than one who hasn't. This is not intended as pulling rank, but as a fairly
obvious truism, and I'd be quite happy to be disproved by someone with more
expertise.
#Moreover, I'm not even convinced, from what is given, that nIchyon
#*disagrees* with charghwI'. As far as I can tell, he's just picking
#charghwI' apart for technical reasons of nomenclature, but I could
#be wrong. nIchyon, if you are actually claiming that charghwI' is
#wrong, that a ' that starts a verb should be ignored when adding a
#prefix, then please address that point.
Nomenclature matters, as any professional in any field knows; and I don't
believe that's what Will was claiming. (see above)
#Sigh. You know, I REALLY hate this constant squabbling *about*
#tlhIngan Hol. We've really got the tail wagging the dog here. The
#English discussion is supposed to *supplement* the tlhIngan Hol
#discussion. Can't we get back to *using* the language? This is
#becoming akin to a group of Priests sitting around arguing about the
#finer points of sex.
You people really should have a look some time at how Esperanto club members
pass their time. ;) (Let that be a warning to the Lojbanis here! :) ) As for
me, besides the absence of TKD from my side, I'll
go along with with Ken Beesely (I think) said a while back: there are not
yet enough resources present in Hol for me to be able to say what I want to.
Furthermore, with the language so poorly documented, and people not asking
the right questions --- or asking the wrong questions, like this business of a
-lo' suffix --- I honestly think metaHol talk is more important at this stage
than Hol talk, and that tera'ngan languages are illuminating in this respect
(which, given the real-world fleshing-out of the language, is hardly
surprising). And I also find the metaHol talk we *have* had here has been of
considerable value to me.
"Kai` sa`n swqh~kan t'akriba` piota`, N N O nsn@mullian.ee.mu.oz.au
kai` sa`n plhsi'aze pia` [h [w'ra te'sseres, I I L IRC:nicxjo RL:shaddupnic
sto`n e'rwta doqh~kan eutuxei~s." C C A University of Melbourne.
K.P.Kaba'fhs, _Du'o Ne'oi, 23 E'ws 24 Etw~n_ K H S *Ceci n'est pas un .sig*
