The Pronunciation of <'>
Saul Epstein 
Fri, 24 Oct 1997 11:26:18 -0500

I just happened to be visiting headquarters over Marketa's way and noticed a
very interesting document called "More on Vulcan." For instance...

<QUOTE>
The name of the planet is W~L'q'n, where "w~l" is a nearly voiceless
latero-bilabial fricative....
The original form of the name of the planet is, historically, 
"wellequanno", a compound of "welle > w~l plus quanno > q'n.
the modern Vucaln "W~l" developed from "welle", i,e. semi-voiced
bilabial fricative "w" followed by "e" , a sound as in standard
English final wovel in word like "teacher" etc. followed by
long lateral "ll" followed again by "e". Since some Vulcans still
pronounce the name of their planet in a more 'archaic' manner, it
may SOUND to our ear as a sequence of [w^l-] or [val-], and hence
the usual transcription "Vulcan".
</QUOTE>

If I understand this correctly, an earlier form of the language we're
dealing with contained a compound which the ZC would render as
<w^ll^quanno>, and from which the modern <w~l'q'n> derives. If the
"experience" of this word is typical, it supports my suspicion that /'/,
while we may classify it as a phoneme, actually represents historical
segments that have been reduced as far as possible toward zero. In the case
of "w^ll^quanno," ALL the vowels have been reduced to zero, and syllabic
consonants (/w~l/ and /n/) have been employed to keep the word from
collapsing altogether.

The only use this information has, besides illuminating the nature of Vulcan
etymology, is to shed light on possible allophones of /'/.

/'/ -> ['](glottal stop)/V_ (after a vowel)
       [0](zero)/C[+syllabic]_;_C[+syllabic] after or before a syllabic
                consonant
       [^](mid-central vowel, VERY short)/elsewhere

This probably doesn't matter to anyone else, but it makes ME a lot more
comfortable with the current distribution of <'> in the lexicon.

--
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