Re: apostrophes in transliteration

Yoon Ha Lee sikayal:

> I'm starting a list of things I've seen apostrophes used for in
> transliteration systems, natlang, conlang or otherwiselang:
>
> 1.  morpheme boundaries, especially (it seems?) in agglutinating-type
> languages
> 2.  glottal stops
> 3.  aspiration (it's used this way in McCune-Reischauer with respect to
> Korean)
> 4.  contractions (like "can't" in English, though I suppose that's
> strictly speaking not a transliteration)
> 5.  unfortunately, people in pulp sf/f who use names like Xe'tar'tika and
> insert apostrophes indiscriminately to make things like "exotic"
>
> Anyone know of any others?  :-p
>
> YHL the whimsical
Yivríndil has two uses for the apostrophe:
1. Orthographic convention.  In Yivríndil, certain vowels are not allowed
consecutively, so for example, béén is not a legal word, but bé'én is.  It
has no affect on pronunciation.

2. Diaresis.  The sequence <ai> w/o an apostrophe is a diphthong, but with
an apostrophe <a'i> it's two syllabes.

Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
"It is of the new things that men tire--of fashions and proposals and
improvements and change.  It is the old things that startle and
intoxicate.  It is the old things that are young."
-G.K. Chesterton _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_