[417] in tlhIngan-Hol
Klingon pronunciation and tonogenesis.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Mon Jan 4 17:37:12 1993
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Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: Allan C. Wechsler <ACW@RIVERSIDE.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1993 16:31-0500
I had the pleasure of listening to Okrand's Conversational Klingon tape;
it has Michael Dorn as narrator, but all the actual Klingon is spoken by
Okrand. (Dorn, I understand, is not comfortable speaking Klingon. A
pity; he's got a good voice for it.) So at last we've got some extended
samples of guaranteed-correct pronunciation. I was pleased that I had
already gotten most of it right.
I'll restrict my comments to two areas: ' and -rgh.
I was disappointed that there were no examples of "glottal echo" (see
the last paragraph of TKD 1.1) on the tape. All the word-final glottal
closures were unreleased, as far as I could tell.
Okrand says in TKD 1.3 that syllables that have glottal stops in them
can steal dynamic stress from the syllable that would ordinarily recieve
it. But the tape makes it obvious that something else is going on.
Glottal syllables, especially syllables with glottal coda, regularly get
raised in pitch. This never seems to happen in non-glottal stressed
syllables. So Klingon certainly has tone, although it is not
phonemic yet. But it would be easy to imagine glottal codas getting
lost in a couple of generations, leaving the high tone behind; if this
were to occur, Klingon would have evolved a true tone distinction.
Speakers who have trouble with glottal codas should always remember to
use high tone; I'd bet the result would be easily understood by a
native.
(I should point out for our linguistically-naive participants that our
current best theory of how Earth languages acquire phonemic tone is
extremely similar to what is happening in Klingon. It's also at various
stages of happening in quite a few Oceanic languages on Earth. Once a
language has two tones, the floodgates are open and intricate multitone
systems can evolve.)
(As another digression, it is intriguing to remember that the Klingon
being spoken now, in the 20th century, is four centuries prior to the
language described in TKD.)
Regarding the syllable coda -rgh: TKD 1.1 says that r is lightly
trilled or rolled, and that it is not the American r (a grooved
corono-postalveolar voiced approximant). Apparently -rgh is an
exception; Okrand always pronounces -rgh with an approximant, and a lax
one at that. This is additional support for the theory of the origin of
-rgh that I advanced in my article in HolQeD 1 last March.
