Guttural and other sounds in Dothraki

[Hrakkar]

This is a continuation of a discussion started in an introduction thread for Shmosh. The question was, what guttural sounds exist in DOthraki, and how can they be best pronounced? There was discussion about 'kh' and 'q'. Your thoughts and ideas are most welcome!

[ingsve]

I listened over and over to that sound clip. The oqet is pretty clear; the rest of it I don't think I have completely worked out. In any case, I will agree with Ovaak that the Dothraki 'q' sound is not that bad at all, compared to, say, a Klingon 'Q'.

Well, you can't compare the Dothraki /q/ with the Klingon /Q/. That's a very different sound namely IPA sound [q͡χ] while the Dothraki /q/ is the IPA sound [q]. The Dothraki /q/ is closer to the Klingon lowercase /q/ which is an aspirated version of the Dothraki /q/ with the IPA sound [qʰ].
 
What you should compare is how the Dothraki /q/ sounds compared to a normal /k/. That's where you'll hear the extra throatiness in the /q/.

This is a page I use as reference for various sounds: http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/consonants.html There you find the Dothraki /q/ as the lowercase [q] called a voiceless uvular plosive. The Dothraki /kh/ can be found as a lowercase [ x ] called a voiceless velar fricative. As you see there are a lot of consonants in that table that are alot harsher sounding than the Dothraki consonants.

[Hrakkar]

This is a page I use as reference for various sounds: http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/consonants.html There you find the Dothraki /q/ as the lowercase [q] called a voiceless uvular plosive. The Dothraki /kh/ can be found as a lowercase [ x ] called a voiceless velar fricative. As you see there are a lot of consonants in that table that are alot harsher sounding than the Dothraki consonants.

Insgive, that is an incredibly helpful tool! I have been looking for something like that for some time. The site also answered the question as to why I was never taught this stuff in school-- IPA didn't exist when I was in school (class of 1979)!

Your explanations were also very helpful in pointing me in the right direction for pronunciation. In the end, though, there is always the nearly unavoidable room for interpretation that will undoubtedly exist until we are all able to spend a few days together with David Peterson and just work on Dothraki. Even then, I think everyone will still speak Dothraki a little differently. Just like the Pythagorean comma makes music infinitely interesting, the little differences in our individual use of language makes it infinitely interesting.

[ingsve]

Insgive, that is an incredibly helpful tool! I have been looking for something like that for some time. The site also answered the question as to why I was never taught this stuff in school-- IPA didn't exist when I was in school (class of 1979)!

Your explanations were also very helpful in pointing me in the right direction for pronunciation. In the end, though, there is always the nearly unavoidable room for interpretation that will undoubtedly exist until we are all able to spend a few days together with David Peterson and just work on Dothraki. Even then, I think everyone will still speak Dothraki a little differently. Just like the Pythagorean comma makes music infinitely interesting, the little differences in our individual use of language makes it infinitely interesting.

Ya, pronounciation is very individual since people often have trouble articulating sounds that they don't have in their own language or that they're not used to pronouncing. This is a large part of why we have accents when speaking in the foreign language. One typical example is the way east asian people mix up /r/ and /l/ since they don't distinguish between those sounds.