Re: apostrophes in transliteration

-- Mensagem original --

>I'm starting a list of things I've seen apostrophes used for in
>transliteration systems, natlang, conlang or otherwiselang:
>
>Anyone know of any others?  :-p
>
>YHL the whimsical
>
Quoting Mark Rosenfeld (http://www.zompist.com/kit.html),

"Avoid using apostrophes just to make words look foreign or alien. Since
apostrophes are used in contradictory ways (they represent the glottal stop
in Arabic or Hawai'ian, glottalization in Quechua, palatalization in Russian,
aspiration or a syllable boundary in Chinese, and omitted sounds in English,
French, and Italian), they end up suggesting nothing at all to the reader."

If I recall correctly, the ancient transliteration system for Chinese used
them to mark the sonorization of consonants:

pa  = ba
p'a = pa

But this is just a guess. In English it is used to mark the genitives, too;
I don't know if it was a contraction; certainly it is no longer (Brazilian's
use it to fake English - yeach). And that O' that its found in Irish anthroponyms?
Oh, and when your ASCII is lousy, you use them to substitute diacritics
(a' = á)!

I fear there are about 200 other uses for apostrophes...

Luís Henrique



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