[Tlhingan-hol] [KLBC] Tlinget influence?

[Casey Ransberger]

Below. 

> On Oct 23, 2014, at 6:23 AM, Steven Boozer <sboozer at uchicago.edu> wrote:
> 
> Casey Ransberger[] :
>>> Does anyone know if the Tlinget language was an influence on the design
>>> of tlhIngan Hol?
>>> 
>>> The "Tl" in Tlinget is indistinguishable to my ear the from "tlh" used
>>> in Klingon.
>>> 
>>> Some words in the language have a striking similarity in terms of the
>>> sound or feel of the words, and it just really struck me while a dear
>>> friend was putting me onto some people speaking Tlinket after I'd been
>>> going on about Klingon and such.
> 
> De'vID:
>> Any similarity you see between Klingon and Tlinget is probably a
>> coincidence, though it possibly stems from a similarity between Tlinget
>> and Mutsun. (I don't know enough about either to comment about
>> that.)
> 
> I believe the {tlh} phoneme also occurs in Nahuatl and Navaho - both well studied by linguists.  Okrand may have come across them in his class work or reading; apparently it's not uncommon in Amerindian languages.  (OTOH the sound is in Welsh too, spelled "ll" IIRC.)
> --
> Voragh
> Ca'Non Master of the Klingons

The Welsh thing seems a bit left-field, but everything else you just said (seems to) make perfect sense. I've apparently misspelled "Tlingit" as "Tlinget" but mostly same diff. It's a language spoken by native Alaskan Indians, so I can imagine that it might have some very strong relationships with languages spoken by other folks living on the north-american continent at the time.