[tlhIngan Hol] Sound of o

[nIqolay Q]

There's a brief description of Klingon sounds using IPA symbols on pages
xxvii-xxviii of the paq'batlh. I don't recall if it was written by Okrand,
though IIRC he at least signed off on it.

The vowels should not pose a problem for any speaker of a European
> language. Except for one, they follow the “Italian,” open pronunciation:
> *a* /a/, *e* /ɛ/, *I* /ɪ/, *o* /o/, *u* /u/.
>

On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 11:04 PM Will Martin <willmartin2 at mac.com> wrote:

> The issue at hand is whether Okrand wrote that description accurately,
> intending it to be pronounced as the glide between two sounds that a
> linguist would recognize in a typical American pronunciation of the word
> “oh” that rhymes with “mow”, or if he was merely making sure that you would
> never use the “o” sound in “pot”, which is the Klingon {a} sound.
>
> Meanwhile, in recordings of Okrand speaking Klingon, there is no second
> vowel sound in {o}. The Klingon {o} is like the first half of the American
> word “oh”, though normal, non-linguist, non-Klingon speaker doesn’t realize
> that the American word “oh” has two sounds. They don’t notice the glide
> from the first half of the word “oh” to the second half because it is
> always there. American English never uses the first vowel sound of “oh”
> alone.
>
> Does that help?
>
> Sent from my iPhone.
>
>
> On Jun 28, 2020, at 12:17 PM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
>
> 
> On 6/28/2020 10:39 AM, Will Martin wrote:
>
> While I completely agree with you, I do so with the understanding that, as
> in Japanese or Danish, a long vowel is a vowel literally held for a longer
> duration. The pronunciation of the long vowel doesn’t shift in either of
> those languages the way that what we call a “long” vowel shifts in English.
>
> When I said "long," I meant it in the sense of *lengthened,* not as the
> diphthong English "long o." Okrand's pronunciation of *toD* and *lenHom*
> includes a *lengthened* *o.*
>
> English "long" vowels were once actually lengthened vowels in Old English
> that had values closer to the Latin values. During the Great Vowel Shift
> the lengthened vowels turned into diphthongs. We still call them long,
> though in English that means a particular set of diphthongs. And we still
> have literally long and short vowels in English, but they rarely play any
> semantic role. Most people don't even hear them. (For instance, the word
> *cheese* is pronounced with a "long *e,*" and it is also literally
> lengthened. The vowel's length is what turns the written *s* into a
> voiced *z.* But if you shorten the *e* sound to rhyme with *fleece,* it's
> still the same word, just pronounced strangely.)
>
> It may be that Okrand is influenced by his American accent: because *toD*
> and *Hom* both end with voiced consonants, he may be lengthening the *o*
> the way you would in English.
>
>
> --
> SuStelhttp://trimboli.name
>
> _______________________________________________
> tlhIngan-Hol mailing list
> tlhIngan-Hol at lists.kli.org
> http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> tlhIngan-Hol mailing list
> tlhIngan-Hol at lists.kli.org
> http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol-kli.org/attachments/20200629/9b761961/attachment-0002.htm>