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]?