When I saw {DItroy’} I thought Okrand was attempting to render the French pronunciation – sort of! - or perhaps an odd mix of French and English.
Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit was originally a French fort founded in 1701.
Or not wanting to add an extra vowel he could also have simply dropped the final consonant, such as {'entepray'} Enterprise, {lIHtentay’} Liechtenstein and {‘oSteray’} Österreich. He routinely does this with Terran names ending in –land: {DoyIchlan} Deutschland,
{ne'Derlan} Netherlands, {'Inglan} England, {SIqotlan} Scotland, {nu'SIylan} New Zealand and {‘ISlan} Iceland.
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Voragh
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From: nIqolay Q
Sent: Monday, October 12, 2020
On 10/12/2020 2:04 PM, nIqolay Q wrote:
Thanks for the source. I was perusing the qep'a' 2020 new words list over the weekend and discovered another one {DItroy'} Detroit.
Interesting example of using a glottal stop to transliterate a "t" in a syllable that otherwise already ends in a consonant.
The final t in Detroit is not aspirated the way a Klingon t always is. A glottal stop is actually closer in sound to the unaspirated
t.
Aspiration doesn't seem to play much of a role in transliterations. In the case of "Detroit", you can't just transliterate the final syllable as
-oyt, because -oyt isn't an allowed syllable ending in Klingon phonotactics. Sometimes, Okrand deals with this (consonant after diphthong) by adding another syllable: "Deutsch" (in "Deutschland") ->
*Doych -> DoyIch. But in this case, since ' is similar to "t", and
-oy' is an allowed Klingon syllable ending, you can just do that.