A lot of workshop writers are throwing apostrophes with criminal abandon into their made-up nouns, apparently not understanding that they're denoting a glottal stop that does have a sound value. I finally asked Suzette Haden Elgin, who is both a science-fiction writer and a trained linguist who's created a language, about the use of glottal stops in science fiction. She gave me quite a cogent explanation:"I've been pointing out that apostrophe problem for decades, to no avail. It seems to be the favorite SF device for indicating "not a Terran language," or some such thing. Many languages do use the glottal stop as a meaningful part of their sound system--a phoneme. Stops are consonants that cut off the flow of air through the vocal tract completely; English has the stops /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/.) Glottal stop does the same thing--it's the sound that separates "uh" from "oh" in "Uh-oh!,"; when little boys pretend to be shooting a machine gun, glottal stop is the sound that goes after each of the "uh-uh-uh...." noises they make. But glottal stop isn't an English phoneme, just an English noise. In Navajo, "na" would mean one thing, and "na'" (ending in glottal stop) another, and "na'a" yet another, and so on; glottal stop is a phoneme in Navajo.
"What SF writers do, however, is throw glottal stops into places where they couldn't possibly be pronounced if you consider the spellings even roughly phonetic--names like "F'n'tra" and similar dreck.
"Then there are other interesting sounds not found in English (ones I don't see in SF as much.) The various clicks and pops of a language such as Xhosa--the sounds one makes by suctioning the tongue to the upper part of one's mouth and then pulling it away--are all called clicks, the way /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/ are all called stops. These are sometimes represented with an exclamation mark. Descriptive terms are added that specify where and how they're made in the mouth. There are lots of them, in lots of languages. The standard thing linguists talk about when this comes up is the fact that nobody can listen to a lecture on click languages and hold their mouth still. Always, the whole room is full of clicks!"
The moral of this story for authors: remember, a glottal stop is a consonant, and three consonants in a row is an unpronounceable mouthful for humans. Try pronouncing your new words now that you know the apostrophe denotes the sound that comes between "uh" and "oh" in "uh-oh." (That is, if your goal is pronounceability.) Help reduce Nalo's blood pressure by using those apostrophes wisely!
Suzette Haden Elgin is a science fiction author, poet, and artist, as
well as the author of the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense
nonfiction series; she publishes three e-mail newsletters and runs a
virtual business from her home in the Ozarks. Recently her Ozark
Trilogy was re-issued by the University of Arkansas Press, and
Feminist Press has brought out a new edition of her novel Native
Tongue with a scholarly afterword; her most recent nonfiction
books are The Grandmother Principles (from Abbeville) and
The Language Imperative (from Perseus). She is now working on
a new SF novel and a series of children's books about the little-known
mannerly Ozark Dragons. For sample issues of her newsletters, contact her at OCLS@madisoncounty.net.
Campbell Award Winner!
Nalo Hopkinson attended Clarion East in 1995. Warner Books decided to make her a novelist in 1997; they awarded her the Warner Aspect First Novel contest and published her book Brown Girl in the Ring, which went on to win the Locus First Novel Award. Her second novel, Midnight Robber, is on the final ballot for the Philip K. Dick Award and the Nebula Award and shortlisted for the Hugo Award. She's a John W. Campbell winner for Best New Writer. She's the editor of Whispers From the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction. Skin Folk, a collection of her short stories, will be published in December 2001. She's currently working on a third novel, Griffonne.
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