The modifier letter turned comma is a character found in

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

resembling a

comma The comma is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight, but inclined from the vertical; others give it the appearance of a miniature fille ...

that has been turned. Unlike a comma, it is a letter, not a piece of

punctuation Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of writing, written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, c ...

. It is used in a number of Polynesian alphabets as the letter ʻokina to represent the

glottal stop The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...

, and in the

Uzbek alphabet The Uzbek language has been written in various scripts: Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic. The language traditionally used Arabic script, but the official Uzbek government under the Soviet Union started to use Cyrillic in 1940, which is when widespread ...

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 , which can be rendered in

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

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 ,Unicode code charts
. Unicode.org. Retrieved on 7 April 2013. 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 The Polynesian languages form a genealogical group of languages, itself part of the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family. There are 38 Polynesian languages, representing 7 percent of the 522 Oceanic languages, and 3 percent of the Austr ...

as ʻokina, a

unicameral Unicameralism (from ''uni''- "one" + Latin ''camera'' "chamber") is a type of legislature consisting of one house or assembly that legislates and votes as one. Unicameralism has become an increasingly common type of legislature, making up nearly ...

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

letter used within the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

to mark the

phonemic A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...

. 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 Armenian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Armenia, a country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia * Armenians, the national people of Armenia, or people of Armenian descent ** Armenian diaspora, Armenian communities around the ...

References

{{Reflist Latin-script letters Punctuation Unicode

Encoding

Use

See also

References