Re: Quirks of the Lexicon
Saul Epstein 
Thu, 23 Oct 1997 15:52:21 -0500

At 03:07 PM 10/23/97 -0500, Rob wrote:

>I have been roaming thru the corpus and texturing the dictionary to
>make it easier to read into a program. I have found a couple of 
>interesting things. In the dictionary, it states:
>
>"H occures only in ancient (Old) Vulcan., cf. ah'Hrak. It may be 
>described as velar h with strong and emphatic friction, voiced
>similar to Arabic 'rain'."
>
>In the lexicon it states:
>"h - as in Eng. hut"
>
>So which is correct? Or, do we have two phonomes here, one designated
>by a capital H and one by a little h?

That's what it looks like -- with the additional point that the phoneme /H/
doesn't exist in Modern Vulcan, except perhaps as preserved in certain
ancient words. By analogy from what happened to Hebrew when it lost
essentially the same sound, I would guess that speakers of Modern Vulcan
would say /a'xrak/.

>Also, the lexicon does not list a phonome of "kh" yet that letter
>combination occurs frequently in the Vulcan words from the TOS books.
>Could this perhaps be an alternative spelling for the phonome /q/?

It's more likely /x/. (That is, a voiceless velar fricative consonant.) But
because I happen to like the way it would sound in some places, I'm thinking
of interpreting some occurances of <kh> as representing an aspirated /k/, to
parallel /th/ and /dh/. Which makes likely the existence of /ph/...

--
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