[tlhIngan Hol] Pronunciation of words ending in "ngan"

Luis Chaparro Caballero luis.chaparro at web.de
Mon Oct 5 02:53:11 PDT 2020


Hi,

that's something I was wondering for a long time. In all examples of spoken Klingon I have heard, the stressed syllable in the word *tlhIngan* seems to be the first one: *TLHIngan*. But according to TKD it should actually be the last one, right?

For most planets and countries we use the name of the planet or country + *ngan*. Since *ngan* is not a suffix, but a noun, the result should also be stressed on the last syllable (if no syllable ends in *'*). I don't know if we can consider these words compound nouns, but anyway at klingonska.org I've found that "in compound nouns, only the last syllable of the *last stem* is stressed".

Is this an exception to the main stress rules or am I missing something here? Or maybe I'm not hearing it properly?

By the way: In the section about numbers in TKD we can read: "Higher numbers are formed by adding special number-forming elements to the basic set of numbers (1--9)". I know, a "number-forming element" is probably not the same as a suffix, but that would explain (at least to me) why these "number-forming elements" are usually not stressed. Maybe is *ngan* not only a noun, but also something like these "special forming elements"?

Thank you!



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