Re: B. Cthia and Nom
Saul Epstein 
Tue, 22 Apr 1997 14:55:51 -0500

From: Rob Zook <rzook*informix,com>
Subject: Re: B. Cthia and Nom

>At 10:48 PM 4/21/97 -0500, Saul wrote:

>
>>Uh-huh. That's exactly why I think we may need something else for
>>glottal stops: because glottal stops are something else.
>
>What do you mean, glottal stops "are" something else?

Ha. Gotta watch those "to be"s.

The sounds a language recognizes as distinct are called its phonemes. A
phonetic category of sounds that occurs as a phoneme or part of a
phoneme in a language is said to be phonemic to the language. A glottal
stop is not phonemic to English, nor to any Indo-European language I'm
familiar with. (It is phonemic to many pre-Columbian American
languages, and to Semitic languages.) As speakers of languages without
a glottal stop phoneme, we hear such sounds, if at all, as gaps in the
pronunciation of a word, spaces between other sounds. For instance, the
commonly occuring English negation, "uh-uh," could be transcribed in ZC
as '^'^. But the apostraphes are not there because there is simply a
pause between the two syllables. They are there because we begin each
syllable by closing our throats at a point called the glottis -- hence
glottal stop.

You may be able to hear the difference by comparying "uh-uh" to the
affirmation, "uh-huh," which could be transcribed in ZC as '^h^. In the
negation, the two halves of the glottis meet at the beginning of the
first syllable, open for the vowel, close and open again for the second
vowel. In the affirmation, the two halves of the glottis close to begin
the first syllable, open for the vowel, spread wide to devoice the
vowel (the /h/ sound), then approach each other again (but don't close)
for the "second" vowel. (Voicing is caused by the two halves of the
glottis being close enough together that the air passing between causes
them to vibrate.)

I raised this issue in the first place because of Rob's transcription
of cthia as

ts't'hia

in which, I think, the first apostraphe represents a very short ^,
inserted to prevent the "difficult" word-initial cluster /tsth/, and
the second apostraphe is there to show that the <t> and the <h> don't
mean a voiceless dental fricative, as in English "thing." Neither
apostraphe would be an actual glottal stop, then. I could be reading
this wrong. But if you actually pronounced a glottal stop for each
apostraphe, this word would begin with a six-consonant cluster, but
would sound to most of us like it had four syllables instead of two:
tsuh-tuh-HEE-ah.

>BTW, I kind of like A'tha for < >. Although I do not like Duane's
>idea that vulcan's have always had this. It does not by itself,
>explain why vulcan's had lots of religions - human have lot's of
>religions and most humans do not have any experience of A'tha.
>
>But, it does make sense to me, for vulcans to start to get that
>experience after learning to practice cthia. It simply follows
>logically that after practicing methods to eliminate all blocks
>to clear perception and thinking one would begin to "grok" the
>universe as it exist.

Mm. I was taking a'Tha to be what was meant in the historical sections
of SW by "the Other," that which knew things that people can't but
which spoke reassuringly to people so that they didn't mind not
knowing. So it would arrive with cthia-practice not as a sense of what
is, but of what isn't.

>Now, we just need a vulcan verb that means to "grok" >;-|

Yeah. It might be related to "nehau."

--
from Saul R. Epstein
liberty <at> uit <dot> net