[Tlhingan-hol] qaghwI'

[Qov]

At 00:52 '?????' 4/24/2012, you wrote:

>ghItlhpu' Qov, jatlh:
> > So I'd have the same grumbling about it in Hawai'ian. Find me a
> > language with a native writing system and a phonemic glottal stop
> > that treats the glottal stop differently from t and k and q and I'll
> > be convinced.
>
>Classic Maya might be such a language.

I didn't realize the Mayans had invented writing.  I thought they 
just had qIppu (sp?) knotted ropes for record keeping. Or am I 
getting confused with the Aztecs?  Or is Maya an Australian language 
unrelated to Mayans?  I could ask Google, but that's way over there 
in that other window.

>Glottal stop is phonemic (though
>only rarely word-initially; there are no syllable characters in Maya
>dedicated to vowel-only syllables as distinct from glottal stop + vowel)
>but the characters for the glottal stop syllables - /'a 'e 'i 'o 'u/ -
>are often dropped from the ends of words where a glottal stop should
>appear:
>
>ka' "two" written /ka/, not /ka-'a/
>
>but
>
>ha' "this, that": /ha-'a/
>mo' "macaw": written /mo-'o/ or even /mo-'o-'o/

macaw: that does place it in South America.

>ma' "not": written /ma-'a/ or /ma/

Wow, that sounds exactly like Okrand's description of Klingon glottal stop.

>and though there's not a distinction between final glottal stop and zero,
>the loss of final glottal stop-vowel characters does hide a phonemic
>distinction between /'/ and /h/, which is also often underspelled:
>
>chih "deer": written in full /chi-hi/ or underspelled /chi/
>chi' "a fermented drink": underspelled /chi/
>nah "great, large": underspelled /na/
>na' "lady": underspelled /na/
>
>Glottal stop tends to behave weirdly in most languages, even those that
>possess it phonemically. Even in Klingon it does, in a small way: it's
>the only consonant that attracts stress to a syllable ending in it.

That's a good point. And it's "impossible" not to pronounce it before 
an otherwise initial vowel. Okay now I can imagine an early native 
writing system that didn't have the qaghwI' because speakers thought 
of it as a stress not really a sound, and the qaghwI' being added in 
a later spelling reform, thereby getting a different shape and name.

It's all good here!  Thanks! DaH pIqaD vIlajlaHchu'.

(dance)

- Qov