[2600] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: tlhIngan Hol qun vIwam - an article
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Tue Jan 18 03:33:54 1994
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@klingon.East.Sun.COM>
From: nsn@vis.mu.OZ.AU (Nick NICHOLAS)
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@klingon.East.Sun.COM>
Date: Tue, 18 Jan 94 19:28:26 EDT
In-Reply-To: <9312120525.AA18591@uva.pcmail.Virginia.EDU>; from "Will Martin" a
t Dec 12, 93 12:24 am
batlh choja', Will Martin quv:
= {tlHIngan Hol qun vIwam} -part 1
Let's just say I'm clearing out my backlog here ;)
= For those unfamiliar with the roots of Klingon, in ST1, an actor
As you'll have been told already, Mark Lenard.
=applied to them. Nobody cared about grammar or vocabulary. During ST3, Marc
=Okrand was hired
I thought it was ST2? (Barron posted on this.)
=[Tactical] at the beginning of ST1. I must confess that I initially thought
=he said {ghuy' cha'}, which is one of the epithets taught at the beginning of
=CK and listed in TKD on page 58, or {ghay' cha'} in TKD on page 178. Neither
ghuy'cha' and ghay'cha' are one word.
=reference to tactical was never made in the Klingon. It should be noted that
=the pronunciation difference between this {cha} (with no glottal stop) and
=all the other {cha'}s (with glottal stops) escapes me.
Hopefully, it no longer does, after the plethora of mail you received after
saying this. There are some quite *clear* examples of this distinction
on the tapes; Marc makes a point of distinguishing, if I recall, between
ghuy'cha' and ghuycha on CK.
=a variation on the word {SuH} at the bottom of page 57 in TKD. He then yells
={baH} as he gives the same hand signal as the first order to fire.
I'll take the opportunity to castigate Marc one more time, for his rather
stupid selection of H for the unvoiced velar fricative. The analogy with
gh would have immediately suggested kh; instead, we're saddled with
oodles of TNG Klingons saying "Fire!", in their hillbilly argot, as "baa".
(incidentally, this is how I'd transcribe this 'dialectical' dropping of
the H in Klingon).
= Note the beginning glottal stop in {'eH}. There are no directions in
=TKD for pronouncing a glottal stop at the beginning of a syllable.
Oh. Was it this you were getting the mail for instead? In either case,
I do think speculations on how to pronounce Klingon don't properly belong
in this article, but in another, to be written by some phonetician or
other (if, after the tapes, this is still necessary).
=I say this from a personal dislike for the {j} sound in Klingon. It fails to
=close a syllable in a clean, Klingon way, and I must confess that it sounds
=barbaric to what I believe to be my acquired Klingon ear. The sound of wej
=makes me cringe. It does not fit the sound of the other numerals. It sounds
=foreign.
I also don't think this belongs in the article, but that's just me.
Phonologies have a habit of including wierd and wonderful things in their
inventories; given the presence of ch, the presence of j is one of the
few *normal* things Klingon phonology does. I also suspect that, if j
isn't closing your syllables to your satisfaction, you aren't pronouncing
it correctly. Try "we-j!"
= Mr. Okrand has remarked several times that he felt this was not a
Dr, if you please.
= I've noticed that the seemingly random capitalization follows the
=pattern that the least English sounding phonemes are capitalized, except for
="i", which for all I can tell is capitalized solely in order to be confused
=with the lower case "L". All characters romanized with diphthongs are lower
=case. This improves legibility for the {H}, since it is involved in {ch},
={gh} and {tlh}. All lowercase singular characters are, for the most part,
=pronounced much like English.
This has already been addressed a hundredfold, it appears in the very first
HolQeD, and I really don't think you should perpetuate this misunderstanding.
"I" is there due to the International Phonetic Alphabet representation of
this phone, small-caps I. "i", in IPA, and to the intuition of most readers,
would correspond to English "ee".
Do refer your readers back to HolQeD 1:1, where the fact that Klingon
phonology is a joke at the expense of phonological universals is explained.
(I see you alude to it, but make it explicit.)
Unfortunately, as I've been finding, phonology and OSV are the *only*
two areas in which Klingon is even remotely alien; everything else in its
grammar is quite boring typologically. Klingon is in many ways a
disappointment; there's been huge opportunity missed here for something
*really* interesting. I really, *really* hope that any other Trek language
designers have a look at some typology texts before churning out yet another
ho-hum lingo.
== == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ==
Nick Nicholas, Breather {le'o ko na rivbi fi'inai palci je tolvri danlu}
nsn@krang.vis.mu.oz.au -- Miguel Cervantes tr. Jorge LLambias
