[Tlhingan-hol] Upper case letters

[Brent Kesler]

I don't think Okrand's choices are random; I think they're rooted in
various methods of phonetic transcription.
- S and D are both retroflex.
- I actually have a Webster's dictionary printed before TKD that uses H in
its transcription of "Bach".
- I (capital i) looks like the IPA symbol for that vowel.
- I have no theory for Q.

bI'reng

On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 11:08 AM, Steven Boozer <sboozer at uchicago.edu> wrote:

> 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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