[tlhIngan Hol] I must be missing something here..
SuStel
sustel at trimboli.name
Sun Oct 14 06:26:30 PDT 2018
On 10/14/2018 4:13 AM, mayqel qunenoS wrote:
> Two computer enginneers examine a malfunctioning computer. And one of
> them says, believing he identified the problem, "its the hard DISC",
> saying the word "disc" a little louder. This is what I understand when
> I read "stress of a word/syllable".
As a computer engineer myself, I would never say /hard DISK;/ I would
always say /HARD disk./
There is a phenomenon in English, whose technical term I cannot remember
now, in which noun phrases that become lexicalized in the language have
the stress shifted to the front. There is an example I heard from an old
sitcom, I think it was /Seinfeld,/ in which the characters are all
saying "Chinese FOOD." The phrase hadn't quite solidified as a lexical
item. Now that it has, everyone says "CHINESE food."
Well, it's like that with /hard disk./ When the concept was new, people
might have said /hard DISK,/ but now no native English-speaking engineer
would every say that; the phrase is /HARD disk./
I can't tell you what they're saying over in Greece, of course, but this
is the case as I know it here in New York.
English accomplishes a lot with stress that its speakers don't even
realize is happening. Another pattern is that multisyllabic noun-verb
pairs like /record/ or /increase:/ when they're nouns the stress is on
the first syllable /(REcord; INcrease);/ when they're verbs the stress
is on the second syllable /(reCORD; inCREASE)./
Klingon does not seem to have these features, so far as we can tell.
> However, in the previous example, if one of the engineers wonders
> whether its the hard disc which causes the malfunction, he can say
> "the hard disc ?". And because he is asking, his voice will pronounce
> the word "disc", with a "rising tone".
/Tone/ is the right word, and is a different phenomenon than stress. We
haven't been told anything about tones in Klingon, but actors have
generally used English-sounding tones. They are not universal across
languages, however.
> However, I notice that on numerous occasions of videos I see on
> youtube, the voice of the speaker does indeed assume a "rising tone".
> Something which seems to happen not only with the {-be'}, but with
> other suffixes as well, which happen to bear the qaghwI' and be the
> last syllable of a word.
Usually what I hear isn't a rising tone in the manner of a question, but
it is a higher tone nonetheless. If you listen to all of Okrand's
recorded voice, you'll usually hear him do it too. Once in a while
you'll hear something else, but stressed syllables usually receive a
higher tone.
Whether this is a feature of the language, a mistake, or irrelevant to
native speakers is unknown. /The Klingon Dictionary/ leaves the matter
of stress vague, and doesn't mention tone at all.
> I can't believe that all those people are doing it wrong
I can totally believe that random videos on the Internet get Klingon
pronunciation consistently wrong. There is a lot of REALLY bad Klingon
out there.
Some common pronunciation errors committed by students who haven't had
much speaking practice:
* Pronouncing *j* as /zh/
* Pronouncing *H* as /h/
* Pronouncing *Q* or *q* as /k/
* Being unable to pronounce *gh* or *tlh* at all
* Trying to pronounce the vowels too far back in the mouth, to the
point of practically choking on them
* Ignoring *qaghwI'mey* completely, especially at the ends of words
* Trying to growl or roar when speaking, because they think that's
what Klingon is
* Holding syllables too long
* Pronouncing unstressed syllables with a schwa vowel instead of the
given vowel
* Shifting consonants across syllable boundaries
* Just giving up completely and making up syllables
Add to this list "Stressing the wrong syllables."
--
SuStel
http://trimboli.name
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