Re: new Klingon spelling

On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 09:41:58PM -0500, Doug Dee wrote:
> I'm completely at a loss to see why it was necessary/useful to capitalize "I"
> (to somehow encourage people to pronounce it as /I/).
We're not dealing with English speakers reading something as English;
we're dealing with English speakers reading something that they know
is a foreign language.   In that context, there is a very strong
tendency to Romancize the vowels to /A E i o u/ (since we've learned
from experience that this works tolerably well for many languages),
all of which are accurate for Klingon except for the /i/, hence the
capitalization.

> The idea of using capitals to draw attention to unexpected sounds might be
> reasonable enough, but the implementation seems utterly random.
Not at all.  Let's review.

a       /A/             standard Romance value

b       /b/             same as English

ch      /tS)/           same as English

D       /d`/            funky retroflex sound which doesn't even appear in
                        English; capitalize it.

e       /E/             one of the standard Romance values (/e/ is actually
                        also an acceptable pronunciation in Klingon)

gh      /G/             Okay, this should arguably have been
                        capitalized, perhaps using <G> instead of the digraph.
                        On the other hand, <-h> in English is a generally
                        productive way of fricativizing a stop (as in
                        <ch>, (English dictionary) <kh>, <ph>, <th>).

H       /x/             A stronger version of English /h/ which otherwise
                        appears only in loanwords or specific dialects;
                        capitalize it.  Alternatives?  <x> would
                        likely be pronounced /ks/, <h> as /h/;
                        <ch> is taken and would be more likely to be
                        taken for /tS)/ anyway; <kh> is a possibility but
                        I'd rather have fewer digraphs, not more.

I       /I/             not the usual "foreign" <i>.  Capitalize it.

j       /dZ)/           all same as English
l       /l/
m       /m/
n       /n/

o       /o/             standard Romance value

ng      /N/             same as English
p       /p/,/p_h/       same as English

q       /q/             This one is odd.  Should probably be capitalized;
                        perhaps Okrand was hoping its appearance without
                        usually having a following 'u' would be enough to
                        cause English speakers to stop and question, while
                        leaving <Q> available for the affricate?

Q       /qX)/            obviously capitalization is called for here;
                        a completely foreign sound to most English speakers.

r       /4/             This is another "generic foreign language" substitution

S       /s`/            Funky sound not found in English; capitalize.

t       /t/             same as English

tlh     /tK)/           This is another "fricativizing h"; the lone trigraph.
                        I think it does a great job of conveying the
                        general shape of the sound, much better than the usual
                        <tl>, which I would naturally pronounce /tl=/.

u       /u/             Romance value

v       /v/             same as English

w       /w/             same as English

y       /j/             same as English

'       /?/             standard Am. English transcription (c.f. Hawai'ian);
                        this one requires explanation no matter what.  And
                        <'> does require the shift key, so it's sort of
                        capitalized. :)


So, hardly random, even if not ideal.  Capitalization was arguably
called for but unused in the cases of <gh>, <tlh>, <q>, and <'> ,
but the rationale for them is IMHO reasonable.

-Mark

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