Conlang Orthography

[bloodyrosemccoy]

I have begun referring to random meaningless apostrophes in fantasy and sci-fi stories as "prepostrophes."

On another note, maybe the more conscientious spec fic conlangers may want to start representing glottal stops with hyphens instead. I know I connect the sound to hyphens far more readily. Howbout you?

Comments

[van.livejournal.com]

Ahahaha, but prepostrophes are such a staple of sci-fi/fantasy now! They make me laugh. I'd be sad to see them go!

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Especially since they're all pronounced "boing" now!

Prepostrophes can be funny, but mostly they're up there with unnecessary umlauts and mystery macrons for making me think the author is just being sloppy. I give you a pass if you can explain 'em, but if not, I deduct points.

[fenmere.livejournal.com]

Hikeda-boing-ya!!! HAHAH!! I love it.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I'm enjoying reading about Daav yosboingPhelium right now, myself.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Drizzt Doboingurden

[van.livejournal.com]

I used an apostrophe once in the country name Japre'achi so that they'd say it Jah-pre-achy instead of jah-preachy. Do you have a better suggestion in that case? Japre-achi just seems weird for some reason. Probably because I'm used to prepostrophes...

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

*grin* That is a fair explanation. Now, I'd parse an apostrophe-less Japreachi as ja-pre-a-chi (I'm assuming the ch is like it is in English? And the i is like the one in "machine"?), myself--I've gotten into the habit of going with classic vowels for fantasy languages by default. Bu twith a largely English-speaking audience, I'm not sure--you could be right.

If anything, you can always just say it's a glottal stop if people bitch about it. (And if you find that it's not really a glottal stop but more of a glide, you could go with Japreyachi--or just say that the language USED to have a glottal stop which is still represented in writing. There--you've got some worlbuilding right there. ;) )

[van.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I kind of like Japreyachi, actually! And I like the idea that, at least in that particular novel, the different countries/cultures would have different words/spellings for it. You should live in California so we could hang out and world build together and write stories. Yes.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I get invited to live in California a LOT. Maybe someday--that'd be fun!

And I'm glad I could help.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

You could always use a diæresis to show hiatus, like in "naïve" or "noël". English and French both do this (though it's fallen out of fashion in English). Tolkien also used it in his languages for that purpose, as well as on final E so English-speakers wouldn't assume it was silent (I'm stealing that idea for Ilion).

[westrider.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much the only place I've used apostrophes when fooling around with conlangs myself.

I actually had a couple of places where it ended up between doubled consonants as well as I recall, so in my system, the German Nachttisch (Night Table) would have been written Nacht'tisch, clearing up any possible confusion for those coming upon it for the first time as to whether or not to run the 't's together.

[beccastareyes]

Some ways to Romanize Japanese do that, mostly with ns (which are the only consonants that can end a syllable).

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

I was working on a lexicon yesterday and found a word with a glottal stop at the end of it. I had naturally marked it with an apostrophe. A hyphen doesn't really work in that case anyway, but I think the apostrophe is more appropriate, since it's use is historically lexical whereas the hyphen is more grammatical. It's also smaller and thus less obstructive.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Good point--a hyphen at the end of a word looks weird. But as someone who grew up reading English, apostrophes either signal possessive or, more frequently, dropped sounds. "Can't, "should've," "goin'," and "seen 'em"--all denote sounds that have been dropped out. But stick a hyphen in and I'll definitely pronounce it--in the form of a slight pause that borders on a glottal stop. It's true for the semantic changes (I pronounce "man-eating fish" different from "man eating fish") and for compounds. When I see "teenager," "today," or "email," I glide through them, but show me the old "teen-ager," "to-day," or "e-mail," and I will stick a stop in there. (And hell, the example people always use to explain a glottal stop--the middle of "uh-oh"--is a hyphen.)

And for fantasy language, this had an unintended consequence in Mark Okrand's Atlantean language for the Atlantis: the Lost Empire movie: to make it easier for the English-speaking actors to read, Okrand wrote it out by the syllable ("NEE-puk! GWEE-sit TEE-rid MEH-gid-lih-men!"), and the actors pronounced it like that.

I'm thinking of this specifically for English monolingual audiences, though. The apostrophe has more past, but I realized that in my head, a hyphen makes more sense as a glottal stop.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I don't pronounce those hyphenated words differently from their nonhyphenated counterparts, and I would guess most English-speakers do as well. But you're right that in English the apostrophe is more common to effect spelling than the hyphen; however, I think that English-speakers understand that the hyphen is different when used in other languages, and are used to seeing them used as glottal stops in translations, as in the word ren'ai below. The apostrophe there indicates a glottal stop which distinguishes between syllables which have distinct lexical meanings. The problem, I think, is that so many works conlangers overuse them for no apparent reason.

Take the Goa'uld language used in the Stargate series. Almost every word has at least one apostrophe in it, which accurately represents a glottal stop, but all these stops result in speech sounding stilted and unnatural. Whether using hyphens or apostrophes, the result will be the same. But the latter somehow looks more appropriately foreign, I suppose.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Hehehe, I love that term.

Despite the fact that the only glottal stop in English AFAICT is spelled with a hyphen (in "uh-oh"), I'm not sure most people would make the connection. I think a lot would assume they mark compounding and ignore them. I've considered using them though.

There are other legitimate uses for apostrophes, though. Like explicit syllable breaks (renai vs. ren'ai), ejectives, or lack of aspiration.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

My accent makes intervocalic and some post-sonorant t's glottal stops--it feels really weird to pronounce the /t/ in "mountain" or "button" (although the ones in "bottle" and, well, "glottal" are alveolar flaps). That's what got me thinking about it--I was writing out that I pronounce it "moun-ain." "Moun'ain" looks like I'm saying it without a stop, since elsewhere in English an apostrophe means dropping sounds. (Note this is for English--in other natural languages I have no trouble parsing apostrophes as glottal stops. What gives me pause is that the apostrophes in so many fantasy stories are written by people who have no experience with languages that AREN'T English, so I wind up trying to apply the English part of my brain to it. For all I studied linguistics, my brain feels there are two languages: English and Foreign. Darn monolingual upbringing.)

[van.livejournal.com]

You example of "moun'ain" vs. "moun-ain" really gets the point across with regards to how my English brain parses the hypen as a glottal stop there and the apostrophe as a "dropped sound."

Maybe we should just buck it all and start using asterisks.

[cjtremlett.livejournal.com]

I've been using the "boing" for sheer amusement when it's obvious the writer has no clue and did not mean a glottal stop. I love the term prepostrophes! That's brilliant!

[sofish-sasha.livejournal.com]

Top Gear has a segment called a Star in an Reasonably Priced Car, where some celebrity gets to take a lap around the track in a, well, reasonably priced car. Said car is a Kia Cee'd, but the presenters never call it that, they call it the Kia Cee-apostrophe-d instead. As they should. ^.^

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

Heh. One of my early scifi settings included a culture that had last names formatted in the style of Prefix-Apostrophe-Suffix, but it was indicating a dropped syllable, since the prefix was a standard reduction of the genitive form of "family". (That said, once I learned more about linguistics, this prior transcription somehow morphed into "That annoying method those people over there used to represent our language, when a more accurate rendition would be..." Ah, baby linguistics.)