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Re: apostrophes in transliteration (stress in Tokana)

From:J Matthew Pearson <pearson@...>
Date:Saturday, February 3, 2001, 21:54
And Rosta wrote:

> Matt: > > > BTW, if some clitics don't trigger stress shift, why write them as > > > part of the preceding word at all, rather than as separate orthographic > > > words? > > > > I guess because (a) native speakers [i.e., me] feel that enclitics form a > > tight unit with the preceding word, and (b) encliticisation triggers > > certain sound changes which are otherwise confined to word-level domains. > > For example, adding a possessive enclitic to a noun ending in a nasal > > triggers nasal assimilation: > > > > konom "hammer" [ko.'nom] > > kononko "your hammer" [ko.'noN.ko] > > > > Also, failure to add an enclitic causes the allative suffix "-ni" to lower > > and become "-ne" word-finally: > > > > totsat "table" [to.'tsat] > > totsatne "towards a table" [to.'tsa?.nE] > > totsatnima "towards my table" [to.'tsa?.ni.ma] > > > > (Note that the enclitics which *fail* to trigger these kind of changes are > > the ones that I'm separating from the preceding word by an apostrophe. I > > guess I need to posit level 1 clitics and level 2 clitics, where the latter > > are more tightly bound to their host that the former.) > > If reason (b) applies only to enclitics not written with the apostrophe, > then clitics that are written with the apostrophe could instead be written > as separate words, no?
Yes. But all such clitics consist of a single consonant sound. And I'll be damned if I have single-consonant words in my orthography. Tokana is not Russian! ;-)
> If you were not so much guided by your personal aesthetics as deriving a > practical roman orthography for Tokana, what would your strategy be?
Probably to connect them to the preceding word with a hyphen. Matt.