On 5/20/2018 11:22 AM, Daniel Dadap wrote:
I was listening to “The Klingon Way” as narrated by Michael Dorn and Roxann Biggs-Dawson, and couldn’t help but notice that it sounds like B’Elanna almost always (but not totally consistently) pronounces the {qaghwI'} as [t]. Perhaps [t] as an allophone of either /t/ or /ʔ/ may have been a feature of Miral’s dialect? Or is it an idiosyncrasy particular to B'elanna?
I like thinking it’s dialect, since “dialect” is usually my headcanon for why Klingon given names often don’t make phonological sense in {ta' Hol}. Either that, or Federation Xenolinguists employ transliterations we don’t understand, or they’re just really bad at transliteration. It doesn’t match the description of any of the dialects listed at http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/Dialect, but does anyone know of other instances where a speaker semi-consistently pronounces {qaghwI'} as [t]?
Dorn and Dawson had only some audio recordings of Okrand and, I think, a brief explanation of Klingon phonology when they recorded those. I chalk it up to actors not being given enough direction; I don't have my head buried so deeply in /Star Trek/ fandom I can't just accept a flawed production as being flawed. That said, we really know only a tiny bit about "the fiction of Klingon conformity." How many planets, with how many districts, and how many cities, are there in the Empire? We don't know. We don't know how well a half-Klingon who doesn't really like being Klingon actually speaks Klingon. There is just so much we don't know, there's really little point in trying to discern the reason for an aberration. It could be anything. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name