The modifier letter turned comma ʻ is a character found in Unicode resembling a comma that has been turned. Unlike a comma, it is a letter, not a piece of punctuation. It is used in a number of Polynesian alphabets as the letter ʻokina to represent the glottal stop, and in the Uzbek alphabet to form the letters Oʻ and Gʻ, which correspond to Ў and Ғ respectively in the Uzbek Cyrillic alphabet.
Encoding
The letter turned comma is encoded at U+02BB ʻ MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA, which can be rendered in HTML by the entity ʻ (or in hexadecimal form ʻ), in the Spacing Modifier Letters Unicode block.
In Unicode code charts it looks identical to the U+2018 ‘ LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, but this is not true for all fonts. The primary difference between the letter turned comma and U+2018 is that the letter turned comma U+02BB has the Unicode General Category "Letter, modifier" (Lm), while U+2018 has the category "Punctuation, Initial quote" (Pi).
Use
The character is used in many Polynesian languages as ʻokina, a unicameral consonant letter used within the Latin script to mark the phonemic glottal stop.
In the Uzbek alphabet, the letter turned comma is used to write the letters Oʻ (Cyrillic Ў) and Gʻ (Cyrillic Ғ).
It is sometimes used in Latin transliterations of the Hebrew letter ʻáyin and the Arabic letter ʻayn.
The letter turned comma is also often used to romanize aspirated consonants in Armenian.
See also
References
- Unicode code charts Archived 15 June 2018 at the Wayback Machine. Unicode.org. Retrieved on 7 April 2013.