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. Andrew
