[Tlhingan-hol] Canon: Associate Producer

[lojmIt tI'wI' nuv]

As Okrand explained, English has no soft onset for vowel-first syllables, so, unless you speak Hawaiian like a native, you don't know what soft onset sounds like or feels like because you've never done it or heard it during your language-formative years. It's like trying to explain "L"s and "R"s to someone who has exclusively spoken languages that lack them, or like explaining the difference between "pin" and "pen" to someone who speaks a dialect that pronounces them exactly alike. The difference is smaller to his ear than the difference between two different people saying "pen", so he can't hear which of the two words anyone is saying.

English starts vowel-first syllables with a glottal stop. Deal with it. 

My wife pronounces "where" and "wear" exactly alike and thinks my pronunciation of "where" is sufficiently alien to her to be no end of amusement. She pronounces "why" like the letter "Y". It leaves me wondering why she doesn't pronounce "who" as "woo". When I point that out, she becomes puzzled. She never thought about that until I pointed it out, then she just declares "That's just how it is," and avoids thinking about it further, since she prefers to think that her pronunciation is generally better than mine, when there is a difference. 

She also thinks that if a man says something in a forest and there is no woman there to hear him, yes, he is still wrong. 

Sent from my iPad
lojmIt tI'wI' nuv

> On Oct 3, 2015, at 4:25 AM, Lieven <levinius at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> I wrote:
>> Because in Klingon, no word starts with a vowel. Even from a linguistic
>> view, in most languages, words woth vowels start with a glottal stop.
>> Try saying "I ate eight egg" without the stop. I will sound like
>> "hi-yate-tate-hags".
> 
>> Am 22.09.2015 um 09:32 schrieb Anthony Appleyard:
>> In my pronunciation of English (I am in England), the separator in "I-ate-eight-eggs" is a slight hesitation, and not a true glottal stop with closure of the glottis.
> 
> This may be correct from a linguistic point of view, but my explanation is the very closest approachment I can get to explain this to a non-linguist, which are most of the Klingon students.
> 
> It's also possible that my example does not work exactly in english as it does in German though.
> 
> -- 
> Lieven L. Litaer
> aka Quvar valer 'utlh
> Grammarian of the KLI
> http://www.facebook.com/Klingonteacher
> http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/Apostrophe
> 
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