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

[Bellerophon, modeler]

I'm surprised I guessed so close. My imprecise wording was apparently
understood as 1500 *phonetically distinct* monosyllabic words.

But my calculation inadvertently included CVwC and CVyC. There aren't any
of course, except if the final C is /'/. {'enterpray'} is good evidence
that those forms aren't allowed.

Here is the tally of the 2541 possible syllables:
CV: 21*5=105
CVC: 21*5*20=2100 (where the second C isn't /w/)
CVw: 21*3=63
CVrgh: 21*5=105
CVw': 21*3=63 (where V=/a/, /e/, or /I/)
CVy': 21*5=105
Total=2541

So Klingon has only 906 syllables left to make into new monosyllabic words.
This makes me further appreciate the constraints MO works under, as when he
had to rewrite dialogue for STID.

~'eD


On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 1:38 AM, Rohan Fenwick <qeslagh at hotmail.com> wrote:

> ghItlhpu' 'eD, jatlh:
> > The beginning of this exchange got me thinking again about how many
> > syllables are possible in Klingon phonology:
> (poD)
> > I'd guess Klingon has around 1500 monosyllabic words, so the ratio of
> > sense to nonsense syllables is getting small, less than 1:3.
>
> I put together a syllable distribution database a while ago, built on the
> presumption that the legal syllable shapes are CV, CVC, CVrgh, CVw' and
> CVy', with no syllables of the form *Cow(') or *Cuw('). On that
> presumption, there are 2,541 possible legal Klingon syllables, and if my
> data are up to date then 1,635 of those possibilities are currently
> attested (64.3%). Of those, 1,461 (89.3%) are monosyllabic words; an
> additional 174 syllable shapes are attested only in polysyllabic words.
> That puts the ratio of sense to nonsense syllables at a little under 3:2.
>
> taH:
> > 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).
>
> Like most Polynesian languages Hawaiian requires lexical words to be at
> least bimoraic, so to have either at least one long vowel or at least two
> short vowels, but Japanese might be an example where intelligible lexical
> monosyllables might be more numerous than nonsense ones.
>
> QeS
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