Re: VL - Vulcan in Vulcan
Saul Epstein 
Thu, 16 Oct 1997 11:36:12 -0500

From: Rob Zook <rzook*informix,com>
Subject: Re: VL - Vulcan in Vulcan


>At 07:37 AM 10/16/97 M, Pat wrote:
>>Rob wrote:
>>>Marketa answered this in Message-Id: 4699 Wed, 8 Oct 1997 09:24:44 -0700:
>>>
>>>" The name of the planet is W~L'q'n"
>>
>>How do you pronounce this?  Can you or Marketa spell it phonetically?
>
>It's spelled phonetically.


In a sense, yes, but since it includes phones outside those most of us are
familiar with, it doesn't look phonetic. It looks impossible.

>Some excerpts from the Vulcan Lexicon:
>
>w~l -           voicless bilabial fricative + lateral as one sound

Which is sort of a single-segment tongue-twister, believe me. I'm tempted to
describe it as a "voiceless lateral fricative with lip-rounding," just to
make life easier for us. But I'd have to hear a native speaker to know if
that's accurate.

>' -             glottal catch; this serves also as syllable-boundary. Thus
>                e,g. the word t'hyla "friend etc" is pronounced so that
>                there is a strong onset [t] followed by offset overshort
>                pause with glottal catch ['], with main dynamic accent
>                on the first vowel of the diphthong, hence [t+'haila]/

It seems more and more likely to me that ['] doesn't represent a phoneme but
the presence of a syllable in the absence of a vowel, or the presence of an
especially "abrupt" syllable boundary in the presence of a vowel -- the
latter manifesting itself phonetically as a glottal stop. This seems most
consistent with the way the sign ['] is being used.

In other words, the Vulcan word for planet Vulcan could probably just as
accurately be written "w~lqn" from a phonetic perspective. Or so it seems to
me. Whereas a word like "your" (2nd person possessive pronoun) in Rob's Mark
Twain quote, must be written "s'at" to distiguish it phonetically from the
unattested "sat."

>q  -     "     quote, but still more "velar" and emphatic.

Uvular in fact. A near relative of "k" sounds, but with the back of the
tongue contacting a point further back in the mouth. Speakers of Arabic and
Klingon, among others, are already familiar with this sound.

>n -     "      not
>
>w~ does not sound like "w" in white, and I'm not sure what an initial
>voiceless bilabial fricative is supposed to sound like, so for that
>well, need some of our linguists to speak up.

This is a complicated matter. Some people pronounce the initial sound in
"white" as a normal /w/, which in most dialects of English is a simultaneous
velar-bilabial approximant. That is, the back of the tongue is brought close
to the back of the roof of the mouth while the lips are brought close to
each other. Some people, when pronouncing "white," precede the /w/ with a
distinct /h/. Some grade school teachers make a big deal out this, the
supposed phonetic difference between "which" and "witch," or between
"whether" and "weather." This attempt to preserve the Old English /hw/,
cousin to the /qu/ of Latin, French, Spanish, et al., is NOT what seems to
be meant by /w~/.

Rather, it is more like /f/. The difference between /w~/ and /f/ would be
that while /f/ is produced by air-friction between the upper front teeth and
the lower lip, /w~/ is produced by air-friction between the upper and lower
lips.

People not interested in the articulatory details may be helped by thinking
of /w~/ as a "hard" version of /w/. The relationship is roughly analogous to
that between the "hard" <th> in "thatch" and the "soft" <th> in "that."

--
from Saul Epstein
liberty <at> uit <dot> net
www <dot> johnco <dot> cc <dot> ks <dot> us <slash> <tilde> sepstein
"Surak ow'pha:per the's'hi the's'cha'; the's'pha:dzhar the's'hi surakecha'."
                                         -- K'dvarin Ursw~l'at