Comments on: The Nebulation: Short Stories

By: Black Gate » Blog Archive » Nebunovels I (The Nebulation Begins to End)

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 07:03:44 +0000

[...] (which began forty two billion subjective years ago with a look at the Nebula nominees for short stories, continuing with the novelettes and the novellas). But I should be able to post on the rest of them [...]

By: Link Across The Sky « Torque Control

Link Across The Sky « Torque Control — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:04:11 +0000

[...] Enge on the Nebula short fiction nominees: short stories, novelettes and [...]

By: braak

braak — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:40:13 +0000

Oooh, the diacritical marks, that’s a good idea.

By: James Enge

James Enge — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:30:08 +0000

You could invent a consonant cluster to represent the sound (e.g. “dd” for voiced “th” in Welsh, which makes a lot more sense than English orthography). Heinlein did this for Martian in Double Star, I think. Of course, you’d have to explain them if you want people to hear it the way you do (but I think you’d have to do that anyway). So it becomes an exposition problem: is this important or interesting enough to infodump or not?

“gjg” might work for your “glug” sound, for instance. Or you could try diacritical marks, e.g. “ǧ” or “ĝ”. But I’d be wary of apostrophes; rightly or wrongly, they raise a red flag for lots of readers (not just me).

By: braak

braak — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:06:22 +0000

@Judith: Oh, well, yeah. That obviously. Phonematized glottalization, duh–who doesn’t know about that stuff?

Hm. I just wrote a short story with an excessive use of apostrophes, to stand in for sounds that I know I can make, but that I don’t know how to spell. How do you signify the sound that you do when you put the back of your tongue against your uvulua, and then sort of drop it down, like you’re making the “glug” sound when you poor water out of a pitcher–but voicelessly?

By: James Enge

James Enge — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 05:40:02 +0000

Some Polynesian languages use apostrophes to encode sounds, too; I’d never say they don’t exist, and I suppose I should have taken syllabic consonants into account. But I don’t see any of the phonological environments you’re talking about in Lar’sz’.

Maybe I’m being unreasonable about this. But it looks to me like the apostrophes were slapped into the word without that much thought just to distort its too-close resemblance to Lazarus.

By: Judith Berman

Judith Berman — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 03:56:20 +0000

Ok, I have to stand up for apostrophes. I mean, they have a legitimate orthographic use, and I am speaking here of real languages, not of fiction, where they might be less justified. Many of the languages of the north Pacific coast, for example, have one or more series of glottalized consonants and use apostrophe. This is distinct from glottal stop. We have glottalization in English but it is not phonemic (i.e., perceived as a meaningful sound unit)–for instance many people glottalize /m/ at the beginnnings of words, but it doesn’t affect the meaning (e.g., as in moon).

Kwak’wala has a glottalized version of most every voiceless stop and affricate and some sonorants. It can also have syllabified nasals or laterals (i.e. syllables with no phonemic vowels), so you could have words with only (orthographically) consonants and apostrophes. Alas, I didn’t bring any reference materials with me to the UAE and my brain is blank at the moment. OK, here’s one: ‘nmsg_m, “one bulky object” (underline=uvular g).

Geekery over.

By: Jeff Stehman

Jeff Stehman — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:45:48 +0000

When in doubt, I just ask myself, “How would Victor Borge have read this?”

By: James Enge

James Enge — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:09:27 +0000

“It’s Old High Vulcan and doesn’t translate well into English”

Ah–maybe the apostrophes stand for ear-twitches then.

By: brb

brb — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:49:57 +0000

It’s Old High Vulcan and doesn’t translate well into English. However, I’m told that native speakers of Classical Gibberish have no problem mastering the proper inflection.