[92946] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: [Tlhingan-hol] qaghwI'
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rohan Fenwick - QeS 'utlh)
Tue Apr 24 03:52:22 2012
From: Rohan Fenwick - QeS 'utlh <qeslagh@hotmail.com>
To: <tlhingan-hol@kli.org>
Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:52:05 +1000
In-Reply-To: <6.2.5.6.2.20120422215017.048472d8@flyingstart.ca>
Errors-To: tlhingan-hol-bounces@stodi.digitalkingdom.org
ghItlhpu' Qov, jatlh:
> So I'd have the same grumbling about it in Hawai'ian. Find me a
> language with a native writing system and a phonemic glottal stop
> that treats the glottal stop differently from t and k and q and I'll
> be convinced.
Classic Maya might be such a language. Glottal stop is phonemic (though
only rarely word-initially; there are no syllable characters in Maya
dedicated to vowel-only syllables as distinct from glottal stop + vowel)
but the characters for the glottal stop syllables - /'a 'e 'i 'o 'u/ -
are often dropped from the ends of words where a glottal stop should
appear:
ka' "two" written /ka/, not /ka-'a/
but
ha' "this, that": /ha-'a/
mo' "macaw": written /mo-'o/ or even /mo-'o-'o/
ma' "not": written /ma-'a/ or /ma/
and though there's not a distinction between final glottal stop and zero,
the loss of final glottal stop-vowel characters does hide a phonemic
distinction between /'/ and /h/, which is also often underspelled:
chih "deer": written in full /chi-hi/ or underspelled /chi/
chi' "a fermented drink": underspelled /chi/
nah "great, large": underspelled /na/
na' "lady": underspelled /na/
Glottal stop tends to behave weirdly in most languages, even those that
possess it phonemically. Even in Klingon it does, in a small way: it's
the only consonant that attracts stress to a syllable ending in it.
QeS 'utlh
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