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[MagmaMcFry]

My cup of coffee is half gone, and every single sip has gone down the wrong pipe. I just start choking for no reason whenever I try to take a sip. I managed my breakfast and a glass of water just fine, I don't know what's up.

Maybe try drinking it with your mouth instead of your nose?

[i2amroy]

Apostrophes. Fucking apostrophes in languages in your fantasy/sci-fi book. What the fuck do those signify, dear author?

Though there are some people who just use them for kicks, the most common meaning is for it to sound like a form of a click consonant, so for example R'lyeh would be pronounced "r-*tongue click*-lyeh" with that meaning. Authors that really know what they are doing might also throw in some of the other symbols that you can find on the page I linked, such as "!" or "|" to denote various types of click consonants.

[Lord Shonus]

Apostrophes. Fucking apostrophes in languages in your fantasy/sci-fi book. What the fuck do those signify, dear author?

Are they, perhaps, signify some feature of the sound before them, like palatalization or pharyngealization or whatever? But no, wait, this can't be the case because you stick them indiscriminately before both vowels and consonants both voiced and unvoiced!

So they've gotta be individual sounds, amirite? Perhaps some consonant like a glottal stop, to which you didn't want to dedicate an entire letter. Okay. Try to pronounce a glottal stop between [t] and [r]. You can't. Admit it. Oh, they're aliens? Quit your whimpering. Their vocal systems are so different that they can pronounce shit like that and that's the only way in which it affected their consonant inventories?

Perhaps these apostrophes have a non-phonetic function, like demarcating morpheme boundaries? That would make sense, but you're using words like R'blablablablabla. Do you mean there are only two morphemes in this long-ass word? Are not all of them marked, perhaps? Okay. See here: this is obviously non-native orthography, yes? Because why would one want to mark morphemes in one's own language? Therefore, this demarcation exists to aid non-native readers. Why would they want to have only some morphemes marked, but not all of them? It still makes no goddamn sense.

Perhaps they mark contractions, like in English. But they're in practically every word in your damn language. So no, not that either.

Oh wait, but maybe the apostrophe means different things depending on whether it's after a consonant or a vowel, like, it velarizes consonants and makes vowels long or something. That's shitty design, but come on, we're writing in English now. Why would anyone do something like that, anyway?

Oh, I know. Because you wanted your magic language or whatever look exotic without much effort. basically by tal'king l'ike th'i's. Th'ats ess'entia'lly w'hat yo'u ar'e do'ing, dea'r A'uthor. You want to make something look cool and hip without making a single effort, and that's gonna make me take you less seriously. I hope you're ashamed of yourself.

Apostrophes can be just fine when used simply and consistently - I personally use them as a "word breaker" (don't know the correct linguistic term for this, you break the sounds on either side of the ' as if they were the beginning and end of a word while keeping it as a complete unit, so "ess'entia'lly" would be pronounced ess entia lly), but you're quite right - far too many authors just scatter them about at random with no idea why.

[Avis-Mergulus]

Funnily enough, Ukrainian, Belorussian (after prefixes), and some transliterations of Russian into English use apostrophes in that sense, because we have vowels which are always read as if they're preceded by a [j] (like the first sound in "yacht") when they're at the beginning of a syllable.
I usually interpret apostrophes as a glottal stop where possible. It's like an almost noiseless contraction of the throat, sounds like somebody sucker-punched you in the gut mid word.

[Neonivek]

Mmmm the mashed potatoes were extra creamy today!

I don't know about anyone else but I LOVE creamy potatoes

[SealyStar]

Th're 're two ma'n reas'ns f'r abusin' 'postr'phes. Th' firs' 's t' show wh're peopl' speakin' 'n odd dial'cts suppos'dly d'n't pr'nounce vowels an' th' sec'nd 's 'nspir'd by the'r use 'n wri'in' foreign languages, 'specially Polynes'n 'r transli'era'ed Semi'ic languages like Hebrew an' Arabic.

[SalmonGod]

Duck Tales theme song set as the music to Beyonce's Single Ladies music video.

This was just inflicted on me, and I cannot suffer it alone.

[Bohandas]

Apparently Indiana University's rugby coach is named "Sopa Enari". That's a rather unfortunate name. That's like if somebody was named "Fugitiveslaveact Jones" or "Indianremovalact Smith".

[SealyStar]

Apparently Indiana University's rugby coach is named "Sopa Enari". That's a rather unfortunate name. That's like if somebody was named "Fugitiveslaveact Jones" or "Indianremovalact Smith".

Seriously, SOPA was a horrible bill and deserved to die but isn't this comparison a bit like the "nerd blackface" thing people on le Reddit trot out about Big Bang Theory?


It's also just generally a simple combination of syllables that occurs in a lot of languages meaning things like "soup", "sweep", and "it hurts".

[Bohandas]

So they've gotta be individual sounds, amirite? Perhaps some consonant like a glottal stop, to which you didn't want to dedicate an entire letter. Okay. Try to pronounce a glottal stop between [t] and [r]. You can't. Admit it. Oh, they're aliens? Quit your whimpering. Their vocal systems are so different that they can pronounce shit like that and that's the only way in which it affected their consonant inventories?

.........

See here: this is obviously non-native orthography, yes? Because why would one want to mark morphemes in one's own language? Therefore, this demarcation exists to aid non-native readers. Why would they want to have only some morphemes marked, but not all of them? It still makes no goddamn sense.

..........

Perhaps they mark contractions, like in English. But they're in practically every word in your damn language. So no, not that either.

Perhaps they mark the deletion of inpronouncable characters or syllables

[SalmonGod]

Spoke with an airline representative a few days ago whose name was "Divorsia"... pronounced like "Divorce Yah"

[Avis-Mergulus]

So they've gotta be individual sounds, amirite? Perhaps some consonant like a glottal stop, to which you didn't want to dedicate an entire letter. Okay. Try to pronounce a glottal stop between [t] and [r]. You can't. Admit it. Oh, they're aliens? Quit your whimpering. Their vocal systems are so different that they can pronounce shit like that and that's the only way in which it affected their consonant inventories?

.........

See here: this is obviously non-native orthography, yes? Because why would one want to mark morphemes in one's own language? Therefore, this demarcation exists to aid non-native readers. Why would they want to have only some morphemes marked, but not all of them? It still makes no goddamn sense.

..........

Perhaps they mark contractions, like in English. But they're in practically every word in your damn language. So no, not that either.

Perhaps they mark the deletion of inpronouncable characters or syllables

Yeah, but that means that in that setting, they can't be used in spoken form by humans or human-analogues. And that's pretty rare.

[Bohandas]

So they've gotta be individual sounds, amirite? Perhaps some consonant like a glottal stop, to which you didn't want to dedicate an entire letter. Okay. Try to pronounce a glottal stop between [t] and [r]. You can't. Admit it. Oh, they're aliens? Quit your whimpering. Their vocal systems are so different that they can pronounce shit like that and that's the only way in which it affected their consonant inventories?

.........

See here: this is obviously non-native orthography, yes? Because why would one want to mark morphemes in one's own language? Therefore, this demarcation exists to aid non-native readers. Why would they want to have only some morphemes marked, but not all of them? It still makes no goddamn sense.

..........

Perhaps they mark contractions, like in English. But they're in practically every word in your damn language. So no, not that either.

Perhaps they mark the deletion of inpronouncable characters or syllables

Yeah, but that means that in that setting, they can't be used in spoken form by humans or human-analogues. And that's pretty rare.

Well they could still be sort of pronounced by skipping over the inpronouncable parts and pronouncing them as written. Sort of like how I can still sort of pronounce words containing accent marks despite the fact that as an American I have no idea what any of them mean by pronouncing what the word would sound like without the offending marks.

[Avis-Mergulus]

So they've gotta be individual sounds, amirite? Perhaps some consonant like a glottal stop, to which you didn't want to dedicate an entire letter. Okay. Try to pronounce a glottal stop between [t] and [r]. You can't. Admit it. Oh, they're aliens? Quit your whimpering. Their vocal systems are so different that they can pronounce shit like that and that's the only way in which it affected their consonant inventories?

.........

See here: this is obviously non-native orthography, yes? Because why would one want to mark morphemes in one's own language? Therefore, this demarcation exists to aid non-native readers. Why would they want to have only some morphemes marked, but not all of them? It still makes no goddamn sense.

..........

Perhaps they mark contractions, like in English. But they're in practically every word in your damn language. So no, not that either.

Perhaps they mark the deletion of inpronouncable characters or syllables

Yeah, but that means that in that setting, they can't be used in spoken form by humans or human-analogues. And that's pretty rare.

Well they could still be sort of pronounced by skipping over the inpronouncable parts and pronouncing them as written. Sort of like how I can still sort of pronounce words containing accent marks despite the fact that as an American I have no idea what any of them mean by pronouncing what the word would sound like without the offending marks.

Even so, it implies that the language in question has only one unpronounceable sound. Which sounds incredibly unlikely: what are the odds that a creature can make all the sounds that a human can make...plus just one more? It has an alteration to its voicebox that is so minute and precise that it can only be used to make a single sound that is totally unpronounceable by a human, even in close approximation?
And you can sort of pronounce those words because they're based on Latin orthography and generally the marked graphemes have similar corresponding soundtypes. You know how to interpret ė or į because they're similar to e and i but you can't pronounce й. Apostrophes are kinda like that too, right?

[Descan]

Well, no. It's not "This thing signifies one sound and one sound only." It's a "... What? Okay, that's another one for the ' pile," scenario.