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
