Transcription

Transcription is the act of representing the sound of a foreign name in Toaq, given its restrictive rules of what constitutes a valid syllable or not. (Name phrases headed with the name marker mı or the quote marker(s) shu and mo should themselves contain valid Toaq.) For ad-hoc, on-the-fly, one-use borrowings, more meticulous-sounding transcriptions may be more appropriate (see first section); for new coinings/borrowings, however, you should take artistic licence in collapsing the foreign word into a more Toaq-friendly form (see second section).

Examples on this page use English as the source language, but the general process is language-agnostic.

Conforming to Toaq phonotactics

There are a few important restrictions which need to be sidestepped when transcribing:

• There may be at most one consonant in front of any vowel, and at most a q following any vowel.

With this in mind, the primary way of “inflating” a foreign word so that it conforms to Toaq’s phonotactics is by breaking up consonant clusters with a vowel that is the same as a neighbouring one and nasals to either -m or -q

past	→	pasata
rumble	→	raqbala
cardamom	→	karadamoq
dragon	→	daragoq

Reducing consonant clusters

Depending on the situation, it may be appropriate to remove a sound or two from the word you’re transcribing to avoid long strings of repetitive-sounding syllables (scrumptious → sakaraqpachasa anybody??). This approach involved identifying the less important sound out of a two in a consonant cluster; usual suspects include sibilants like s and liquids like l r:

stooge	→	tuju	(/st/ → /t/)
transpose	→	raqposo	(/tɹ/ → /ɹ/ → r; /nsp/ → /np/ → -qp-)
smile	→	maılı	(/sm/ → /m/)
cardamon	→	kadamom	(/ɹd/ → /d/)
scrumptious	→	saraqchasa

Also pay attention to soundalikes and actual pronunciations of words rather than their spellings, which may aid in producing a nicer-sounding form:

rumble	→	raqbo	(final syllabic /l̩/ sound often realized as [o] or something similar in some dialects of English)
empty	→	emtı	(/mpt/ → /mt/ reduction already present in spoken English)

There are two things to keep in mind when following this approach:

• You are very likely to run into existing Toaq words. Such a connotation may sometimes be undesirable. (Note that if you’re attempting phono-semantic matching, then this technique may give you bountiful results.)
• Intelligibility suffers. If you’re trying to coin a word via a borrowing, then this is perhaps the appropriate thing to do, but if you’re invoking the name of a person or thing on the fly, you may not be understood. Exercise due taste.

For consonant clusters ending in /s/ or /z/ specifically, it is often enough to turn them into s or c or z:

capsaicin	→	kaseısıq, kaceısıq	(/ps/ → /s, ts/)
axolotl	→	asoloty, acoloty	(/ks/ → /s, ts/)

Similar treatment could be applied to consonant clusters beginning in /s/ or /z/, such as /st/, /sk/ (past → ?paca); however, this sort of transformation is highly dependent on your sense of aesthetics and doesn’t read very clearly. It may be acceptable in borrowings and coinages.

Handling foreign sounds

• /w/ and /j/ can be turned into ꝡ. In past versions, they were turned either into b and j respectively or dropped.
• /ts/ and /dz/ should always be cy, zy, never tysy, dyzy (e.g., rights, rides → raıcy, raızy not
• raıtysy, *raıdyzy). /z/ can stay as z, even though the two are not the same.
• /θ/ and /ð/ (as in English thought, thigh) may be transformed into s/z, t/d, f/–, p/b. There is no consensus about which transcription is the superior one, but some may be more appropriate for some source languages than others (e.g., Spanish [θ] is really a variation of /s/, so transcribe it as s).