[Tlhingan-hol] Upper case letters

[Steven Boozer]

Hod qunnoQ:
> is it known why the specific letters (written always in upper case in Klingon)
>  were chosen by Okrand ?
> i mean why "S" and not "G" ? why "D" and not "M" ? and so on..
> does anyone know the reason behind these choices?
IIRC Okrand used upper case to indicate those letters which were pronounced differently from English.  That is, {S} is closer to /sh/ than /sss/; {H} is like the /ch/ in Bach, not the /h’s/ in Hannah; {I} is like the dotless /i/ in Turkish or the *bI* in Russian, not /eee/ in Spanish or Italian, and so on.  It was simply a way of warning the actors in Star Trek III (which he coached at the studio) to be careful when delivering their Klingon lines.  But he wasn’t consistent.  Why, for example, did he use the digraph {gh} for the gargled *ghayin* of Arabic or the uvular /r/ in French instead of  G, which doesn’t otherwise appear in Klingon?  And then there’s {tlh}!
--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons




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