| From: | Doug Dee <amateurlinguist@...> |
|---|---|
| Date: | Saturday, January 3, 2004, 2:42 |
In a message dated 1/2/2004 7:33:19 PM Eastern Standard Time, markjreed@MAIL.COM writes:>On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 06:36:42PM -0500, Tristan McLeay wrote: >> My understanding is that, because Klingon was designed to be read by >> non-linguistically inclined people (actors), Okrand used capital letters >> to lemind people of the special pronunciation, even if the lowercase >> letter was unused.>Thank you, Tristan. That's it exactly. The orthography was chosen to >make native English-speakers stop and think about what they were saying >before they said it.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/ ). Given the CVC shape of most Klingon syllables, /I/ would be an English speaker's first guess anyway. Why not capitalize "a" so as to remind people not to pronounce it as /&/ -- probably an English-speaker's first instinct? The idea of using capitals to draw attention to unexpected sounds might be reasonable enough, but the implementation seems utterly random. Doug
| Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |