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

[SuStel]

On 10/5/2020 5:53 AM, Luis Chaparro Caballero wrote:
> 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?

    Finally, it should be noted that there are some words which seem to
    have variable stress patterns, with the stress sometimes heard on
    one syllable and sometimes on another. This phenomenon is not yet
    understood. The rules given above do not account for this
    variability, but if they are followed, stress will wind up on
    acceptable syllables.

In other words, the rules for stress are a vague approximation, and 
wherever you see exceptions you mustn't be too surprised. Neither should 
you expect to be able to explain the exception.


> 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"?

Number-forming elements certainly are suffixes. They're number suffixes. 
Numbers aren't nouns, even if they act like them sometimes.

Is *ngan* a suffix? Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, it doesn't give us 
predictive power over stress.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name

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