Star Trek: The Undiscovered Consonant

Okay, this post has nothing at all to do with Star Trek. I just wanted to play off the title of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (arguably the best Star Trek movie thus far; it was the one where the Federation and Klingons had a warming as a sci-fi metaphor for the end of the Cold War).

This post has to do with a discussion I was having with Bill down yonder about Indonesian phonology (i.e., how Indonesians pronounce their words).

The weirdest thing I’ve noticed about Indonesian phonology so far is that K (of all letters) tends to be altered when it is word-final (i.e., at the end of a word). It isn’t simply dropped (like my Gs in “-ing”) but is replaced with a distinct glottal stop, so the word “bapak” (masculine “you”) is pronounced /bapa’/ and the word “tidak” (“no, not”) is pronounced /tida’/.

For folks who aren’t familiar with the term, a glottal stop is when, as you speak, you interrupt the airflow by closing the glottis, or the hole between your vocal chords. You can hear a glottal stop very distinctly when it’s substituted for the Ts in the Cockney pronounciation of “a little bottle” as “a li’le bo’le.”

We use glottal stops all the time in English (even those of us who aren’t Cockneys), we just don’t recognize it because we don’t have a letter for it in our alphabet. (The Arabic alphabet does have a letter for the glottal stop, however. It’s called a hamza.)

You yourself use a glottal stop whenever you pronounce distinctly a word that begins with a vowel. For example, if you aren’t talking and then say the word “apple,” you’ll have a glottal stop before the A because your vocal cords are tensed up.

You also say it in the middle of every time you say “Uh-oh!”

Betcha didn’t know that there’s a consonant in English that we all use but that is completely unnoticed by most of us!

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

17 thoughts on “Star Trek: The Undiscovered Consonant”

  3. Jimmy,
    Interesting fact for you (and probably very few others)—in a related phenomenon, in Egyptian Arabic, the consonant qâf almost always becomes a glottal stop, with the exception of words with religious, historical, or literary significance (e.g., Qur’ân, al-Qâhirah and qâmûs, “Koran,” “Cairo,” and “dictionary”).
    And for those scoring at home, that apostrophe in Qur’ân represents the hamzah glottal stop Jimmy’s talking about.

  4. Oh, and FYI, here’s what my Big Book says on the glottal stop in Malay:
    “The phonemic status of ʔ is disputed. Some linguists maintain that it is an allophone of k in syllable-final position (kakak [kakaʔ] ‘elder sibling’, rakyat [raʔyat] ‘people’) and a predictable, non-phonemic transitional phenomenon between two vowels of which the first is a or e or between two identical vowels (seumur [səʔumur] ‘of the same age’, seékor [səʔekor] ‘one (animal)’, keenam [kəʔənam] ‘sixth’, maaf [maʔaf] ‘pardon’, cemooh [cəmoʔoh] ‘mock’). Although this undoubtedly represents the original situation, thepicture has changed under the influence of loanwords which do not conform to the pattern just described: fisik [fisik] ‘physical’ versus bisik [bisiʔ] ‘whisper’, maknit ‘magnet’ versus makna [maʔna] ‘meaning’. Summarising, it can be said that the orthographic ‘k’ in word-initial and intervocalic position always represents k, while elsewhre (i.e., syllable-finally) it either represents ʔ or, less frequently, k.”

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