Hello, and welcome back to Klingon for Humans, I am here to talk to you about actually quite
a lot that need a lot of explaining, so I'll wait until after the intro.
[Intro] There we go, much better! So, I'm here to
explain Klingon phonotactic rules. Phonotactic rules are rules in place that languages must
follow when building words, like in English, words can't begin with ng, even though they
can end with ng, so thing can be a word, but not ngought, which might be the bane of your
existence it your last name is Nguyen. It's like that. So anyway, I'm here to discuss
the phonotactic rules of Klingon. Quick disclaimer, though, these are just observations made by
me strolling through the dictionary, and are not truly official, though they easily could
be. Okay, now that I got that off my chest, here we go!
First, with words and suffixes, they must be three or four Klingon letters long, though
words can have more if they're polysyllabic. Suffixes generally only have three letters.
When it comes to vowels, they're always in the middle of words, and there is only one
per syllable. If a Klingon word begins with a vowel, it really begins with a glottal stop,
same if the word ends in a vowel, it's followed by a glottal stop, which is how you get 'u',
not u for universe. Prefixes can only ever have two letters, and are just consonant-vowel.
All this enables Klingon to have remarkably short words, which makes
Klingon rapping easy. Now for diphthongs -- don't laugh! Diphthongs
are letter combinations like kr or ts. Diphthongs, whether consonant diphthongs or vowel diphthongs
(why are you still laughing?!) don't happen in Klingon. All consonants and vowels are
on their own, except for a neighboring glottal stop, which generally counts as a consonant,
but can come after another consonant. This excludes things like j, ch or Q, which are
their own sounds in Klingon, and have their own characters. This is why, as said in the
title, that Klingon isn't a Klingon word, even if you spell it "qlIngon", it still doesn't
work. The real Klingon word for Klingon if of course tlhIngan.
There are a few exceptions to the no-diphthongs rule, they are rgh, ay, ey, Iy, oy, uy, aw,
ew and Iw, all of which, by the way, only happen at the ends of words, like chorgh,
the word for eight, or the word for blood, 'Iw, or million, 'uy. Just to be clear, though,
y and w count as consonants, so it's really a vowel-consonant pair, which would have been
allowed anyway because the sound order in monosyllabic Klingon words is consonant-vowel-consonant-optional
extra consonant. This can be a glottal stop after a consonant, or the rgh diphthong, which
is the only consonant-consonant diphthong Klingon truly has*.
So, I hope this helped you understand how Klingon works, and what "phonotactic rules"
means, and as always… thanks for watching this video, please give it a like if you enjoyed
it, and subscribe for more in the future. See you on Wednesday and stay positive!