[Tlhingan-hol] the birth of a new word: qorgh

[Bellerophon, modeler]

The beginning of this exchange got me thinking again about how many
syllables are possible in Klingon phonology:

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 3:41 PM, Lieven <levinius at gmx.de> wrote:

>
> During an interview with Marc Okrand, I overwhelmed him and said: "Okay,
> let's create a new word just now and here, so that people may see how that
> works. You've got thirty seconds."
>
> He immediately started laughing and shook is head, but he was willing to
> play along.
>
> MO: Oh boy! What do we need a word for? Or maybe a verb? ... Verbs are
> generally easier.... If I only have such a short time, I would probably
> just make up a single syllable that hasn't been used yet.
>

Linguists, please excuse me if I inadvertently bend the definition of
phoneme in the process of tallying up the number of possible syllables.

Klingon syllables are formed of four phonemes, in order of position:

   I: b,ch,D,gh,H,j,l,m,n,ng,p,q,Q,r,S,t,tlh,v,w,y,' (21 possibilities)
  II: a,e,I,o,u (5 possibilities)
 III: r,w,y,<null> (4 possibilities)
IV: b,ch,D,gh,H,j,l,m,n,ng,p,q,Q,S,t,tlh,v,',<null> (19 possibilities)

Note that /r/, /w/, and /y/ are not included in IV. Terminal /r/, /w/, and
/y/ are already accounted for in III if IV is <null>, and no Klingon
syllable ends with -wr or -yr. {meyrI'} and {ghawran} are not exceptions to
this rule; they would be syllabified mey-rI' and ghaw-ran.

There would be 21*5*4*19 possibilities, or 7980, except that position IV is
limited if /r/ is in position III. In practice, syllables with /r/ in
position III only have /gh/, /q/, or <null> in position IV (to cite the
latest example, {qorgh}). Also, /ow/ and /uw/ never occur. The bottleneck
is in III: if III is /y/ or <null>, there are 21*5*2*19=3990 possibilities.
If III is /w/, there are 21*3*1*19=1197 possibilities. If III is /r/, there
are 21*5*1*3=315 possibilities. This makes a total of 5502 possible
syllables.

(New vocabulary could increase the number of possible syllables; a glance
at the above list suggests that "barb" could be a Klingon syllable, and
certainly /rQ/ seems possible if /rq/ already occurs. If any phoneme in IV
except /'/ is allowed after /r/ in position III, the total number of
syllables would increase to 7077.)

I'd guess Klingon has around 1500 monosyllabic words, so the ratio of sense
to nonsense syllables is getting small, less than 1:3. But one
error-checking mechanism of a language is that nonsense monosyllables
outnumber their intelligible counterparts (though this is probably not the
case for Hawaiian). I've run across estimates that English has about 9000
monosyllabic words out of over 100000 possible monosyllables. If I say
"cork" at a noisy dinner party, you might hear it as "fork" or "pork," but
you would not expect I said "gork." (Actually, it turns out "gork" is
medical slang for a brain-dead patient.)

So how does this Klingon vocabulary land rush play out?

~'eD
-- 
My modeling blog:          http://bellerophon-modeler.blogspot.com/
My other modeling blog:  http://bellerophon.blog.com/
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