Re: apostrophes in transliteration (stress in Tokana)

dirk elzinga wrote:

> On Fri, 26 Jan 2001, Matt Pearson wrote:
>
> > Incidentally, why do you prefer the hyphen over the apostrophe for
> > marking clitic boundaries?  Because apostrophes are used for so many
> > other things?  I was thinking of English and French contractions when I
> > decided to use them.
>
> Well, my preferences are just that, and entirely subjective to
> boot. I always associate orthographic apostrophes (as opposed to
> apostrophes found in a transcription) with missing segmental
> material, and that doesn't seem to apply for Tokana. On the
> other hand, a hyphen seems to me to connect elements which
> belong together but just not as tightly as affixes to a word. So
> that's what I think.
Well, the apostrophe *does* represent missing segmental material, in a way.
Most absolutive clitic pronouns in Tokana have two forms, one of which
consists of a consonant and a vowel ("me", "te", "ne", "se", "tse") and one
of which consists of just a consonant, with the vowel deleted ("m", "t", "n",
"s", "ts").  It is the latter which attach to the preceding word with an
apostrophe if that word ends in a vowel.  For example:

  Inlotka   malhima     te  halma
  yesterday read-Pst-1s the book
  "Yesterday I read the book"

comes out as:

  Inlotka   malhima't       halma
  yesterday read-Pst-1s-the book
  "Yesterday I read the book"

It seems reasonable to think of "malhima't" as a contraction of "malhima te",
just as "don't" is a contraction of "do not" in English.


> How is it handled in the native script? (Feel free to answer
> that one to the list if you'd like; I'm sure there's interest.)
In the native script (a syllabary), prosodic words--consisting of a lexical
word and its unstressed clitic associates, if any--are written without any
spaces, and a special diacritic is added to the syllable bearing main
stress.  Transcribing this directly wouldn't work well, though:  I'd end up
with lots of accent marks.

Matt.