Re: apostrophes in transliteration

Yoon Ha Lee writes:

> 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
I used to mark unusual syllable boundaries with apostrophes for a
while.  In a RPG, I once played a character named An'arauthir, where the
apostrophe was in place to note that the name was pronounced
[an-a-rau-Tir], not [a-na-rau-Tir], as one would have expected from the
spelling "Anarauthir".  (The name was meant to be from an unspecified -
and never worked out - language spoken on the southern tip of
Middle-earth [no, not Rokbeigalmki ;-)]).

> 2.  glottal stops
In Modern Vandalic (an Arabic-influenced East Germanic language), I use
"'" for 'alif (glottal stop) and "`" for `ain (pharyngeal fricative).
(The native script of Vandalic is Arabic, of course.)

> 3.  aspiration (it's used this way in McCune-Reischauer with respect to
> Korean)
Isn't glottalisation more commonly expressed this way?

> 4.  contractions (like "can't" in English, though I suppose that's
> strictly speaking not a transliteration)
I actually use this in Nur-ellen for elided prepositions and similar
things (e.g. _na_ + _Alkarin_ -> _n'Alkarin_).

> 5.  unfortunately, people in pulp sf/f who use names like Xe'tar'tika and
> insert apostrophes indiscriminately to make things like "exotic"
I cannot stand it any more.

> Anyone know of any others?  :-p
6. Weak vowels: in Nur-ellen, "`" represents a schwa (which is not
written at all in the native script, but inserted "automatically"
according to phonotactic rules).  Example: Tavrob`l [tavrob@l].

Not to forget:

7. Stressed syllables (in IPA).

Jörg.