At 10:10 -0700 2002-08-20, Andrew C. West wrote:
>On Tue, 20 August 2002, John Cowan wrote:
>
> > It has no sound, but neither does Romance "h"; both
>exist as a marker of etymology.
>
>But in fact the apostrophe may have a sound in dialectal English,
>where it is used to represent a medial or final glotal stop (e.g. "a
>drin' a wa'er" for "a drink of water" in Cockney English). In this
>usage it is surely acting as a letter, not a punctuation mark.
It is acting, as it did in its origins, as a graphic symbol showing
the omission of an letter.
-- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
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