A dorm buddy and I had this discussion when the movie originally came out. We were both somewhat of Linguistics nerds at the time-- he still is from what I hear. The reason, at least in the case of vowels, is that you can run lots of vowels together in a name and use apostrophies to prevent the vowels from diphthonging.
Diphthong (http://www.unicode.org/glossary/#digraph). A pair of vowels that are considered a single vowel for the purpose of phonemic distinction. One of the two vowels is more prominent than the other. In writing systems, diphthongs are sometimes written with one symbol, and sometimes with more than one symbol (for example, with a digraph).
(Also, spot the 2 digraphs and a trigraph in "diphthong.")
In re: the movie we were discussing the name Sha'uri, which wouldn't sound very good if read by an English speaker sans apostrophe: Shauri. "Shorey," maybe? Not good. So a quick glottal stop is go. (They definitely used a glottal stop in the movie, but in the show, "Goa'uld" is usually spoken with diphthong: goowahoold-- that may depend on the actor/speaker.)
But the addition of apostrophes in SF names tends to be a memetic disease, hence while Goa'uld makes sense at least as far as the above need, Teal'c would sound just like Tealk or Tealc or Teelk. Also, I watch the show when I can, so I know that in Goa'uld, the u is pronouced [oo], but as English speakers go, there's nothing in the word to indicate that: Goa'ulde might do the trick, and would Welshing the name to be Goa'wld. Which-all means that Froggy is correct that it's a contraction of a countryside village-name. Q.E.D. and good eye, Froggy!
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Stargate triviums
Date: 2003-11-21 09:22 am (UTC)In re: the movie we were discussing the name Sha'uri, which wouldn't sound very good if read by an English speaker sans apostrophe: Shauri. "Shorey," maybe? Not good. So a quick glottal stop is go. (They definitely used a glottal stop in the movie, but in the show, "Goa'uld" is usually spoken with diphthong: goowahoold-- that may depend on the actor/speaker.)
But the addition of apostrophes in SF names tends to be a memetic disease, hence while Goa'uld makes sense at least as far as the above need, Teal'c would sound just like Tealk or Tealc or Teelk. Also, I watch the show when I can, so I know that in Goa'uld, the u is pronouced [oo], but as English speakers go, there's nothing in the word to indicate that: Goa'ulde might do the trick, and would Welshing the name to be Goa'wld. Which-all means that Froggy is correct that it's a contraction of a countryside village-name. Q.E.D. and good eye, Froggy!