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

[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.