[Tlhingan-hol] Number of possible syllables

[André Müller]

Dear group,
For a presentation on a students' meeting of linguist in about a week I'm
preparing a presentation of the Klingon language (mostly of its grammar).
I'm going to talk about the phoneme system of the language and will have a
slide with the phonotactic structure, that is, the pattern of the Klingon
syllables. Everyone will agree that there are 22 consonants (C) and 4
vowels (V) in Klingon.
So I got the following general structure:

CV(C(C))

That means the possible syllables are CV, CVC and CVCC, with these numbers:

CV (22x4) = 88
CVC (22x4x21) = 1,848 (I took 21 final consonants only, because there's a
special rule for the -w, see 1) below)

Then it gets a bit complicated:

1) -w only occurs after the vowels -a-, -e- and -I-, so there's only Caw,
Cew and CIw, but no *Cow or *Cuw (22x3 = 66)
Add these to the second number above, and we get 1,848 + 66 = 1,914 true
CVC syllables.

2) -w' only occurs after the vowel -a-, so there's only Caw' possible, no
*Cew', *CIw', *Cow' or *Cuw' (22x1 = 22)
3) -y' only occurs after the vowels -a-, -e-, -o- and -u-, so the
combination *CIy' is not possible (22x4 = 88)
4) -rgh can occur after all vowels (22x5 = 110)

I derrived these rules by having a look at my own compiled dictionary,
which can be automatically sorted from the end. Are these rules or some of
them explicitly stated somewhere in Okrand's books or maybe in some HolQeD
issue? Or am I overlooking some syllables? In my dictionary the
sort-from-end function only works for words, not for syllables, so maybe
I'm missing something. Maybe there's a CIy' syllable or a Cow syllable
inside some word which I didn't spot...
In TKD, page 17, Okrand states that there are no words that have "ow" or
"uw", so that proves my assumption 1), but not the others...

Back to maths:
There are 88 CV syllables in Klingon, 1,914 CVC syllables, 22 allowed CVw'
syllables, 88 allowed CVy' syllables plus the 110 CVrgh syllables.
All added together, it seems there are 2,222 possible Klingon syllables
that are allowed ("well-formed") in the language.

These do not include (in my eyes) ill-formed foreign words {qIrq} (I think
there's only this one), the simply untranslated {Archer} that appears in
some sentence and the endearment suffix {-oy}. Why not the latter? Because
I'm only talking about phonemical syllables, not about morphemes. SoSoy
('mother') has two morphemes: SoS-oy, but two different syllables: So-Soy.
I know this is an assumption coming from the studies of natural languages
and the phonetical processes we witness in Terran languages and it's
unclear if it can be applied to Klingon as well. I do not want to raise an
issue about the suffix {-oy} here, so I'm simply leaving it out of my
counting.

So what I'm saying is, leaving out the disputable suffix {-oy}, there are
2,222 possible syllables in Klingon. Are my assumptions, observations and
calculations correct? Did I miss something? I had quite some
miscalculations on the way, so I'm a bit unsure if I did everything
correctly in the end. Maybe some of you, who have their private
dictionaries as a differently searchable file or excel table could tell me
if they found any syllables in Klingon which I deemed impossible (by
marking it with an asterisk above)...

Thanks very much in advance!
- André
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