Just out of curiousity, why do you write "northward" as "north'ard"? The contraction doesn't make sense as you are omitting one character to replace it with another. Is it to convey accent or is it common where you are to write it this way?
> The contraction doesn't make sense as you are omitting one character to replace it with another.
Are you saying that it's pointless to replace the w with an apostrophe because the number of characters doesn't change? If so, this is not how contractions work. The point isn't to reduce the number of characters in writing, the point is to indicate in writing where letters have been omitted in the spoken pronunciation of the contraction.
As I said elsewhere when I said convey accent, I meant pronunciation. So in that situation I understand it's use, I just hadn't heard it pronounced like that before.
Huh. Your comments made me wonder if there are any English words, perhaps acknowledged in a dictionary, containing punctuation. A quick poking around suggests the answer is: no.
I don't think that is true. Look at what your sentence fragment would be:
the a'os'rophy can al'o in'i'ate pro'nun'i'tion
If you leave out those letters you are omitting the important beginning sounds of each sylible. You generally want to highlight that sound and hide unnecessary characters.
If you had taken the time to listen to the video, you would have heard that the 'w' in 'northward' was indeed omitted in the pronunciation as well as in the spelling.
