Learn Mando'a

Don't forget the glottal stop represented by the benten: '

The benten, represented in our alphabet by an apostrophe, can represent the presence of a glottal stop in a word. Basic doesn't use glottal stops very much, so it isn't as intuitive to us, but one example of a glottal stop found in basic is the short pause you hear in the word, "uh-oh." If you pay close attention to the way your throat moves when you say uh-oh, you can feel how the air is cut off in the back of your throat. This is a glottal stop. There are many different kinds of "stops" your mouth regularly makes and which letter sound they make depends entirely on which part of your mouth is stopping the air from flowing. If you stop the air with your lips, it makes a "P" or a "B" sound. If you stop the sound with the tip of your tongue near or touching your upper teeth, it makes a "T" or a "D" sound. If you use the back of your tongue, it makes a "K" or a "G" sound (not the "J" sound). If you stop the air in your throat behind the "K" and "G" sounds, you make a glottal stop, which has no letter association in Basic.

Something that might help you picture this and feel the difference in your mouth is the following exercise:

Start by saying, "uh-oh" except exchange the glottal stop with a P sound to say, "up-oh" instead. Now use T instead to say, "ut-oh". Now use K instead, "uk-oh". Finally, say "uh-oh" as you would normally. Hopefully this will teach your mouth that the glottal stop works just like these other letters except that it uses a different part of your mouth and using the benten sound will be feel more natural to you by association with these more common letters.

If needed, I can post some youtube videos containing recordings of me practicing the above exercise so you can hear how it is supposed to sound as well as me saying a few common Mando'a words containing the benten sound (coincidentally, the word, "Mando'a" itself contains this sound).

Sometimes a benten in a word represents a compound word, which is two words spliced together to make a new word, or it can be used with suffixes or prefixes. Whether or not the benten is pronounced (or even used) in these circumstances usually depends on the two letters the benten is location between.

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Do we need to be careful with this topic? Some of this material is almost verbatim the stuff in the files I downloaded from KT's site. Would it be better to link to her files on this? One way we could make this topic more "original" is to expand on it by giving descriptions, examples, and maybe even using the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Lyat'aag wrote:Don't forget the glottal stop represented by the benten

Ah, thanks. Actually, thats one i often forget and need to work on.

Lyat'aag wrote: Do we need to be careful with this topic? Some of this material is almost verbatim the stuff in the files I downloaded from KT's site. Would it be better to link to her files on this? One way we could make this topic more "original" is to expand on it by giving descriptions, examples, and maybe even using the International Phonetic Alphabet.

True. And yes, I do need to be careful on this. this is the first post, i covered this as imo you need to be able to know how to pronounce a word to speak a language... these aren't just going to be 'Pronunciation' lessons, but 'Mando'a' lessons.
In future lessons i'm going to attempt to go over sentence structure and basic words, so this was just a first step.

And hey, you seem to know more about language in general than me so if you want to help just pm me.

I changed (at least for now) the lesson so that it isn't as similar to the quick grammar sheet.
As always, comments, critiques, and changes that need to be made are appreciated

Vor'e

This should be stickied. Ori'vor'e, you've reminded me why I started taking linguistics classes in the first place...and making me sad I didn't continue.

As for using the IPA, it might be tricky to do, because of font differences and such. I know how to make webfonts work, but unfortunately, I'm not sure they will work in a forum context; they have to be defined within a CSS file, and they must be both displayed and hosted on the same domain. http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator for a method to generate that.

Alternatively, you could use the older style of sound transcription, using "checked" letters, as I'm pretty sure support for accented characters is uniform across browsers and platforms...or the good-old "sill-AHB-ik sownd it owt" method.

http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/inte ... e/ipa.html offers advice and tools for using IPA on the web, but it will alienate IE users, since IE's unicode support is apparently not up to par...like the rest of its support for web standards.

... or I could just type it on my computer, screencap it, edit the image to a reasonable size, and post it as an image file here on the forum. That might work for IPA too.

Yeah, you got me there. I didn't think about images. My geek-brain got in the way of my reasonable-ideas brain.

Haav is bed, jorcu is because.

This thread has been rather helpful to me, I printed off the wordlist and I'm working on memorizing it. My grammar's good, but my vocabulary is lacking...

Vlet Hansen wrote:Haav is bed, jorcu is because.

(really not sure how/why I did that...)
Nice catch. Thanks

Thank you for this. The word list is helping me out a lot. I've also started writing them like we used to back in elementary school. 10 words x 3,5 or 10 apiece. It's how I learned english. It should work for mando'a as well.

DuesPo, you should definitely join us on Mando'a Chat Night as well -- I've learned a lot from being put in the brief-but-regular high-pressure situation of translating back-and-forth manually, to the point where I begin to internalize words as a defence mechanism.

Adi'karta wrote:DuesPo, you should definitely join us on Mando'a Chat Night as well -- I've learned a lot from being put in the brief-but-regular high-pressure situation of translating back-and-forth manually, to the point where I begin to internalize words as a defence mechanism.

I'm in Australia so at the time of this post it's 1729 Tuesday 15 April when is the next Mando'a chat?

We do them every Sunday at around 2000 EST, or 0100 Zulu. The Eastern Australia timezone is at 1100 Monday at that time. If that doesn't work there's a chance we could try to push it back 24 hours so it's the weekend for all of us.

Is there a word for to practice for example you have hibirar but I wanted to know how to say to practice.

Vlet Hansen wrote:We do them every Sunday at around 2000 EST, or 0100 Zulu. The Eastern Australia timezone is at 1100 Monday at that time. If that doesn't work there's a chance we could try to push it back 24 hours so it's the weekend for all of us.

that would be great. Vor Entye.

Want to learn Mando'a? Hopefully I can help is getting cluttered with discussion.
Discussion is good, though, so I decided to make this thread. Post questions, responses, spotted errors, and such here.

Does anyone have a copy of Karen Traviss's grammar guide and vocabulary? She shut down the section of her site that had it. Thanks!

EDIT: Never mind, I found them.

Hey KalStorm, could you point me in the direction of the grammar guide and vocabulary? I could only find 404 pages wherever I looked.

Also, in Lesson 1 :“Gar taldin ni jaonyc” Shouldn't this be "Gar taldin nu jaonyc" ?

http://web.archive.org/web/201001071821 ... html/mando.

Archived Jan 2010

Also check out our Links page: viewforum.php?f=14

yes, it should be "nu" or basically anything other than ni

Apologies if this in the wrong section.
Looking for help. I am trying to find information when asking questions of using Tion and Me.

In example when you would use Tion and when you would use Me? I can understand that Tion is mostly used for how, who, why, what, and when. Example Tion gar gi? and Me'vaar ti gar?