On 8/16/06, Sabine Cretella sabine_cretella@yahoo.it wrote:
I took part in that thread and then, as now, as have not received a definitive answer and certainly no references at all to explain the orthography or the grammatical reasons for it.
My main question is does Neapolitan use a) a single character that looks like an English double quote mark or two adjacent apostrophes or b) a character that looks like an English apostrophe which in certain situations can occur as a "double letter"?
it substitutes the letters that are not pronounced
Articles
'o (male) 'a (feamale)
So if it substitutes letters which are not pronounced, what are those unpronounced letters in 'o and 'a? My guess is that they are a special exception which are always written 'o and 'a perhaps historically having had an official letter. If this is the case we could say the rule is:
A double apostrophe occurs when contraction is made with the definite articles, these being always written with an apostrophe.
So my further questions: a) Is there a "full spelling" for 'o and 'a? b) Are there any words besides 'o and 'a which take an apostrophe even when not part of a contraction?
de = preposition
like in Italian the preposition + the article become "one word" --> d''a
there is no "unique" character - one' belongs to the preposition the other to the article
pe + 'a --> p''a
That is the rule of course it also depends on pronunciation whenever a preposition that ends in a vowel meets a definite article this way of writing is neccessary. There is no Neapolitan keyboard as such - some created a keyboard layout that helps to type more easily, but that's all
- no official stuff.
The way of writing Neapolitan dates back to the 18th century when it still was used as written language in everyday life - then due to historical reasons Italian substituted Neapolitan. Of course some changes are needed to adapt these old ways of writing and communicating to our days ... only think about IT-terminology.
So well, the reason for having these double '' and for being them two distinct chars hopefully is cleared by this. If not: please let me know.
99% clear so thanks very much. My advice then is to adpot a policy of "use straight apostrophes for markup and curly apostrophes for words". Where d''o and d''a will break formatting or require ugly workarounds, d''o and d''a will always "just work". (And look better too).
Well it's my POV that this is the best goal to aim for for all Wikis and there are certainly many who disagree with me, but I suspect few of them are involved in Neapolitan wikis.
You could go half way and recommend straight apostrophes except in the case of the double apostrophe but that sounds ugly to me.
Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)
Best, Sabine
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