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.
- A stressed (initial) syllable must not contain y (note that ay uy ıy ey oy are all fine).
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 y (a so-called epenthetic vowel), converting n and m sounds to syllable-final q wherever feasible:
| past | → | pasyty |
| rumble | → | raqbyly |
| cardamon | → | karydamoq |
However, one must watch out for words like dragon, which start with a consonant cluster. Using the above method, we would get
- dyragoq, which contains an invalid stressed y. In situations like this, we insert a so-called echo vowel – we repeat a neighbouring vowel instead of y. Our pet example then becomes 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 y syllables (scrumptious → sakaraqpychysy 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 | → | tujy | (/st/ → /t/) |
| transpose | → | raqposy | (/tɹ/ → /ɹ/ → r; /nsp/ → /np/ → -qp-) |
| smile | → | maıly | (/sm/ → /m/) |
| cardamon | → | kadamoq | (/ɹd/ → /d/) |
Also pay attention to soundalikes and actual pronunciations of words rather than their spellings, which may aid in producing a nicer-sounding form:
| rumble | → | raqby, 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 (like maıly above, which means ‘love/dear’). Such a connotation may sometimes be undesirable. On the other hand, words with a sufficient amount of ys in them are unlikely to be understood as Toaq compounds. (Note that if you’re attempting wikipedia: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 → ?pacy); 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/ sounds (as in wine, yam) should be rendered as b, j respectively (baıny, jamy). It is also possible – but discouraged – to turn those sounds into /uː/ and /iː/ – uaıny, ıamy – or drop them altogether – aıny, amy.
- /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).