Re: apostrophes in transliteration (stress in Tokana)

John Cowan wrote:

> J Matthew Pearson wrote:
>
> > The final stress
> > here is justified by the fact that these words used to end in an [h]; the [h] was
> > dropped, but the word-final stress triggered by the final consonant was retained.
> > (In fact, the [h] remains when a suffix is added, e.g. _napeh-mo_ "with the
> > daughter".)
>
> Is final [h] still possible in Tokana?  If not, you might respell "nape"
> as "napeh", with a spelling rule that final written "h" is not
> pronounced.
I really should spell these words with a final "h", giving "napeh", etc. (and in fact I
routinely do spell the words this way when posting bits of Tokana on this list, since I
can't get diacritics on my email program), but there's just something unaesthetic about
final "h"s.  (In my role as a con-linguist of Tokana, I justify my spelling convention
by claiming that the Tokana don't spell the [h] in their native orthography, which was
introduced after the sound-change took place.)

To answer your first question, final [h] *is* still possible in Outikfe, a highly
conservative dialect spoken in a handful of villages at the extreme southern end of the
Tokana territory.  (Outikfe is so divergent from the other dialects that it's sometimes
classified as a separate language.)  I suppose this is all the more reason to include
the "h" in my spelling, but somehow I can't bring myself to do it.


> I am very fond of these morphophonemic spelling systems.
>
> >   eta              "X walks"                [E.ta]
> >   eta' (< eta-a)   "that/if/when X walks"   [e.TA]
>
> How about "etaa" for the latter, with a rule that "aa" is pronounced
> like "a" but attracts the stress?  (And similarly for the other
> vowels, as I suppose.)
I thought about that alternative, but then quickly rejected it--also on aesthetic
grounds.  Double vowels just don't do it for me (especially "ee" and "oo"--overtones of
English and Dutch orthographies, which I hate).  They're fine in Finnish, but somehow
they don't fit the character of Tokana.

I'm actually fine with using an accent grave to represent stressed final vowels, like in
Italian.  That orthographic convention was never really in doubt.  It's what to do about
the suffixed pronouns that had me worried.


> > How do I distinguish orthographically between [E.ta.na] "s/he walks" and [e.TA.na]
> > "that/if/when s/he walks"?
>
> > (3) Add an addendum to the basic stress rule of Tokana to the effect that suffixed
> > pronouns don't cause a stress shift, and then mark exceptions to THAT rule with an
> > accent over the stressed vowel.
>
> I like this best. After all, orthographies are intended to provide
> literacy for native speakers, who already know what is and what is
> not a suffixed pronoun.
Yes indeed.  When I first started getting serious about conlanging, I would get rather
anal about making my transcription systems 100% transparent and my morphologies easily
segmentable.  But experience has taught me that native speakers of a language can
tolerate quite a bit of (potential) ambiguity, and that I shouldn't worry about that so
much (given my stated goal of linguistic 'naturalism').

My only reason for hesitating in implementing proposal (3) was that, in certain cases
you can suffix a pronoun not just to its syntactic host, but to any old word which
happens to precede it.  For example, in the sentence:

  Ma uthme ineh   ihai      te  halma
  I  gave  to.the woman.DAT the book
  "I gave the woman the book"

the dative determiner "ineh" usually suffixes to the verb as "-na", while the absolutive
determiner "te" suffixes to the preceding word as "-t":

  Ma uthme-na    ihai-t        halma
  I  gave-to.the woman.DAT-the book
  "I gave the woman the book"

Now, I have no problem writing "uthme-na" as a single word, since the dative object "-na
ihai" bears a close syntactic relationship to the verb (in syntax parlance, the verb
*selects* the dative object as one of its *arguments*).  However, I hesitate about
writing "ihai-t" as a single word, since "ihai" and "-t" do not form any sort of
syntactic unit.  Instead, they merely form a prosodic unit by virtue of being linearly
adjacent in the sentence.

So here's the solution I've adopted:  In cases where the suffixed pronoun forms a close
syntactic unit with its host (typically, when the host is a predicate and the suffixed
pronoun is [part of] an argument of that predicate), I will write them together as a
single word, without any breaks.  In cases where the suffixed pronoun is merely forming
a prosodic unit with its host, but does not bear a direct syntactic relation to it, I
will separate them by an apostrophe.  Thus, the sentence above will be written as
follows:

  Ma uthmena ihai't halma.

How does that sound?

Matt.