Discussion Main / PunctuationShaker

Not worth adding, but people might find it amusing. A tweet from Awful Fantasy: "The Elvish prince was so powerful and legendary that his first name alone contained more than twenty apostrophes." (I saw it as a screen clip on another site and don't do twitter, so can't post a link.)

I feel like we should mention the ʻOkina, a "letter" so to speak that represents a glottal stop that mostly appears in Polynesian languages. I wanted to mention this before actually adding it to the article.

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I was wondering whether or not the name Saïx should be in this article.

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It is mentioned that apostrophies in the middle of a word don't change it. Isn't the general convention to treat them as a pause in the word, like a 'breath mark' in a musical score? To give an example from my brother's Spore game he has up, "Glaak'na" should be pronounced "gl[long a][pause]nah", in an almost-two-sylables-but-a-bit-longer way?

I'm making an edit in the Semitic languages entry. It's not that the Semitic languages lack vowels. It's simply that they're not always written with normal letters. Arabic, for example, has both long and short vowels. The long vowels have letters (alif, waw, and ya), while the short vowels are represented by diacritical marks. However, these marks are often omitted, unless it's absolutely required to understand a word. Since the voweling can change a word's meaning entirely, it's important to read them in context (and this is one of the reasons Arabic is difficult to read for non-natives). Hebrew's vowels are all written diacritically, but typically, those are also omitted.