Dorothea Salo raises a question I've been wondering about myself for a while: what is it about scifi/fantasy and its love of the meaningless apostrophe?
A few months ago, during an all-day D&D session, my sister Jenni (who is a linguistics student) pointed out some of the names on the map contained apostrophes with no apparent linguistic meaning whatsoever.
Jenni and I also observed that Stargate SG-1 is particularly guilty of using the otiose apostrophe (e.g. Teal'c and many others names).
One interesting exception in Stargate is Goa'uld where the apostrophe could legitimately exist to indicate that 'a' and 'u' are separate syllables and not the diphthong 'au'.
But what is strange is that Goa'uld seems to be completely mispronounced by Daniel Jackson who is supposed to be a linguist (or is it an archaeologist this week? Or an anthropologist?). In the first two seasons I'm watching on DVD, I've heard three distinct pronunciations:
Jackson always says the first, Teal'c always says the third. Others vary (I think General Hammond uses the second).