A blog about imaginary typology in imaginary languages.
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Detail #150: Word-level diacritics
Diacritics that encode prosodical information and tell us about the intonational patterns over larger units than syllables is a thing I have never seen in a conlang or a real language for that matter.
http://www.frathwiki.com/Conlang_terminology#Dutch_Emphatics -- The use of a diacritic mark to denote emphasis of a whole word is an old conlanging practice. As a matter of practicàlity, the stressed syllable is the one that gets the diacritic; but as a matter of meáning, the diacritic marks the whole word. Personally, I think it is a more elegant solution than using *asterisks* or CAPS to denote emphasis. Anyway, asterisks are already used by many conlangers to distinguish an axis of deixis between the primary world and the subcreation -- an axis where the ordinary locative pronouns (here and there) are inadequate to the task. After all, whìch "here" and whàt "there" are we talking about? This one or that one? So, *here* denotes the primary world while *there* denotes the subcreation.
http://www.frathwiki.com/Conlang_terminology#Dutch_Emphatics -- The use of a diacritic mark to denote emphasis of a whole word is an old conlanging practice. As a matter of practicàlity, the stressed syllable is the one that gets the diacritic; but as a matter of meáning, the diacritic marks the whole word. Personally, I think it is a more elegant solution than using *asterisks* or CAPS to denote emphasis. Anyway, asterisks are already used by many conlangers to distinguish an axis of deixis between the primary world and the subcreation -- an axis where the ordinary locative pronouns (here and there) are inadequate to the task. After all, whìch "here" and whàt "there" are we talking about? This one or that one? So, *here* denotes the primary world while *there* denotes the subcreation.
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