Re: apostrophes in transliteration (stress in Tokana)

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 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.)


> 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.

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