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 | → | eqtı | (/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).