Glottal stop (letter)

ʔ Majuscule: Ɂ, Minuscule: ɂ, called glottal stop, is an alphabetic letter in some Latin alphabets, most notably in several languages of Canada where it indicates a glottal stop sound. Such usage derives from phonetic transcription, for example the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), that use this letter for the glottal stop sound. The letter derives graphically from use of the apostrophe ʼ or the symbol ʾ for glottal stop.

Glottal stop
ʔ Ɂ ɂ
Usage
Writing systemLatin script
History
Development
  • ʔ Ɂ ɂ
Other
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.
IPA cased and cased glottal-stop letters

Graphic variants

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Road sign in British Columbia showing the use of the digit ⟨7⟩ to represent /ʔ/ in the Squamish language.

Where ⟨ʔ⟩ is not available, not being in the basic Latin alphabet, it is sometimes replaced by a question mark ⟨?⟩, which is its official representation in the SAMPA transcription scheme. In Skwomesh or Squamish, ⟨ʔ⟩ may be replaced by the digit ⟨7⟩ (see image).

In Unicode, four graphic variants of the glottal stop letter are available.

Other notations

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Other common symbols for the glottal stop sound are variants of the punctuation mark apostrophe that was the historical basis of the glottal stop letters. These include the 9-shaped modifier letter apostrophe, ⟨ʼ⟩, which is probably the most common (and the direct ancestor of ⟨ʔ⟩), the 6-shaped ʻokina of Hawaiian, ⟨ʻ⟩, and the straight-apostrophe shaped saltillo of many languages of Mexico, which has the case forms ⟨Ꞌ ꞌ⟩.

Usage

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Technical transcription

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Vernacular orthographies

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Computing codes

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In Unicode 1.0, only the unicase and superscript variants were included. In version 4.1 (2005), an uppercase character was added, and the existing unicase character was redefined as its lowercase. Then, in version 5.0 (2006), it was decided to separate the cased and caseless usages by adding a dedicated lowercase letter. The IPA character is first from left, while the extended Latin alphabet characters are third and fourth from left.[1]

Character ʔ ˀ Ɂ ɂ
Unicode name LATIN LETTER
GLOTTAL STOP
MODIFIER LETTER
GLOTTAL STOP
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER
GLOTTAL STOP
LATIN SMALL LETTER
GLOTTAL STOP
Character encoding decimal hex decimal hex decimal hex decimal hex
Unicode 660 0294 704 02C0 577 0241 578 0242
UTF-8 202 148 CA 94 203 128 CB 80 201 129 C9 81 201 130 C9 82
Numeric character reference ʔ ʔ ˀ ˀ Ɂ Ɂ ɂ ɂ

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "Proposal to add LATIN SMALL LETTER GLOTTAL STOP to the UCS" (PDF). 2005-08-10. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-09-26. Retrieved 2013-11-04.
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