Re: B. Cthia and Nom Rob Zook Wed, 23 Apr 1997 09:15:16 -0500 At 02:55 PM 4/22/97 -0500, you wrote: >From: Rob Zook >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. Good point, of course ;-) Actually, for a change, I did not intend to harp on that. I just did not understand what you meant. >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. Well, hmm..,_Foundations of Linguistics_ has this to say about phonomes: ..,and proposed a general principle that complementary sounds that resembled each other sufficiently could be regarded as members of the same structural element know as a PHONOME. This conclusion is possible only if we specify the exact pronunciation of the phonome according to the PHONOLOGICAL ENVIRONMENT, by rules such as the following: Tamil /t/ is pronounced as: [dh] between vowels; [d] after /n/; [t] elsewhere. Note: the [dh] represents the voiced dental fricative represented by the international phonetic symbol which looks like a "d" with a cross thru the top, but I could not figure out how to get Eudora to let me enter that symbol. >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.) A glottal stop is not phonemic all by itself. However,if I'm not mistaken, in English, the glottal stop is part of the /t/ phonome in certain dialects. (Like saying i:', instead of i:t for "eat"). >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. Why would that not make the glottal stop part of the /^/ phonome? >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.) Or part of the /h/ phonome? >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/, No. I did mean a glottal stop. The second stop I was unsure about, since at that time, I felt unsure what ZC meant by a aspirated "t" sound. Now that I think about it, I was evidently trying to seperate the "ts" into a fricative and a glottal stop. >and >the second apostraphe is there to show that the and the don't >mean a voiceless dental fricative, as in English "thing." Neither >apostraphe would be an actual glottal stop, then. In the case I meant, after reading your explaination of an aspirated consonent, I mean ts'thia where that "th" represents /t/ as pronounced in "tin". The "ts" represents a voiceless dental stop (but I don't know the terminology to tell you how it's different from "t"). But when I pronounce it almost sounds like a dental-aveolar fricative. >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. You could not read it wrong, and that does represent one possible interpretation of what I wrote. Just not the one I intended ;-) >>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. It seems to me you have anthopomorphize "the Other" a bit more than I would have. I regarded "the Other" a bit more metaphorically. >>Now, we just need a vulcan verb that means to "grok" >;-| > >Yeah. It might be related to "nehau." Well, nehou means "feelings, vibes". To grok, means (almost) to "fully understand, and integrate into oneself". Literally in old martian, I think Heinlein said it meant to "drink deeply". Rob Z.