What's with all the apostrophes?

[Thekherham]

I've been taking a tour through the science fiction section and looking at all the different alien species. I have just one question: What's with the apostrophes??? Does adding a bunch of apostrophes to a name make it alien? If the apostrophe is there for a reason then the name had better be pronounced different. If it's pronounced the same way, then there is no need for an apostrophe or two or three, is there?

I'm sorry, but that is one of my pet peeves.

If this is in the wrong section, then please move it to someplace more appropriate.

[manfred]

The apostrophe thing... well, okay, it is a cliche. It looks good and kinda alien (or at least like a different language). If you are a GM/storyteller on the budget, adding one or few can make a name look different easily, preferably without unprounounceable sounds to torture your players or readers with.

Note that some of those subs do contain the preferred pronunciation. If it doesn't differ from the expected, it may be just a cultural thing, or have some different meaning, something only captured while writing.

I admit it can look silly if overdone - but hopefully most of them aren't too bad.

In the end though, it is the content, that is king... if you like something with a bad name, you can of course rename it.


(Moved here from the questions thread of freeform rpgs.)

[Ancient Gamer]

I like apostrophes in small measures!

[Strolen]

I think we should use more of these: ? § Ø ß þ ‡

[Pariah]

I've no problem with apostrophes, but I think that's because I've been inured to sounds the human throat isn't supposed to make.  Generally speaking I just read them as glottal stops.

[Siren no Orakio]

Haha, ooops, this is probably at least partially my fault. I use a lot of apostrophes in the Kel'Regar language because it is, in my mind, a very pace-and-inflection dependent language. That apostrophe in my writings is not quite a glottal stop, but a point in the word where the inflection changes as if you had just had a glottal stop, without the full stop.

Could be worse. We could be using clicks and glottal explosives...

[MoonHunter]

I too am guilty of over use of apostrophes. It takes some practice to say words with gutterals and hard pauses. I know, I had a unit on it in an Anthropology class I took.  However, since most Human Languages do not use this sound (adding the tongue click and <g> to that pile), you can make something sound non human by using them.

[Pariah]

What noise exactly is <g>???

[MoonHunter]

Old designation. I can not type the new one.  It sounds like

g-long a-r-d smooshed together.

It is a sound not used in English.

[Cressida]

I hope necro-threading isn't frowned on here, but I just wanted to point out that this phenomenon is quite widespread.  TV Tropes even has a name for it:  the Punctuation Shaker (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PunctuationShaker).

(Warning:  I am not responsible for the consequences of people wandering over to TV Tropes and getting sucked in.)