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.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-11-20 03:44 am (UTC)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.