Re: Glottal stops (was: B. Cthia and Nom)
McReynolds 
Mon, 28 Apr 1997 17:23:43 -0500

Saul Epstein wrote:
> 
> My dialect pronounces the above words as [badl] and [haspIdl], so
> there's another variation. Even though English has a /t/ phoneme and a
> /d/ phoneme, some occurences of [d] are allophones of /t/, and vice
> versa. The word "voiced" is usually pronounced [voist].

You wouldn't be from the southwest, would you?  I live in Texas, and I
pronounce things just as you said above.  Not really vital to the
discussion, but I thought it was neat how they corresponded.

Regarding glottal stops, I do not believe that they should be used as
syllable breaks.  I think that we should take given words and names from
the books and shows (such as Spock, T'Pring, etc.) as Federation
transliterations of the words, and not the actual spelling in the Vulcan
Romanized alphabet.  This occurs in Klingon, my only foreign language
besides Spanish.  For instance, the word K't'inga (a Klingon starship
class) is actually written as {qItI'nga} in {tlhIngan Hol}.  The {'}s in
the English version are simply what some Federation guy wrote down when
he heard "kih-tih-ngah."  I would write T'Pring as {tIpring} or perhaps
{tI'pring}.  We should spell the words how the actors pronounce them,
not how the script has it written.  Just because the name is written
like "T'Pring" in a book written in English does not mean it is
pronounced as {t-glottal stop-pring} by Vulcans, and as such should be
written as pronounced.  I think it is highly unlikely that a glottal
stop would be used between two consonants without a vowel stuck in
there, and that is a change I would make to the lexicon.  The {'} should
eitehr be used as a glottal stop OR a syllable boundary, but not as
both.

-McReynolds