ʔ

Ɂɂ

Multilingual distance sign in British Columbia , Canada. In the Squamish language name of the place Squamish ʔ is replaced by 7.

The ʔ is a letter that was incorporated into the Latin writing system. The letter is commonly used to represent the unvoiced glottal plosive ; B. in the international phonetic alphabet . A superscript ˀ is sometimes used to represent glottalized consonants.

The origin of the sign is not clearly clarified, one thesis says the descent from the Greek Spiritus lenis . In appearance, the sign resembles a question mark without a point. If the character is not available due to technical restrictions, the question mark or the number 7 is often used.

In many languages that contain the voiceless glottal plosive, it is not phonemic and is not represented in the typeface. In some languages, however, the glottal plosive is phonemic, in which it is represented in the vast majority of cases by an apostrophe , and more rarely the special character Saltillo . In some languages, however, the ʔ itself is part of the alphabet, as in the Nootka language . While the character mostly only occurs in one form, based on the model of the original, there are also languages in which separate uppercase and lowercase letters Ɂ , ɂ were created in order to adapt the character to the other Latin characters, e.g. B. in Chipewyan . The lowercase letter in these cases is simply a scaled down version of the uppercase letter.

Representation on computer systems

Unicode encodes different versions of the character ʔ:

The regular character ʔ, which is used in phonetics as well as in some alphabets and has only one form, is encoded at code point U + 0294 in the Unicode block IPA extensions .
The capital letter Ɂ, which is used in alphabets that recognize the character as capital and small letters, is encoded at code point U + 0241 in the Unicode block Latin, extended-B .
The corresponding lower case letter ɂ is coded in the same Unicode block at code point U + 0242.

Web links

Commons : Glottal Beat Letters - collection of images, videos, and audio files

Michael Everson, Chris Harvey: Document L2-05 / 194R: Proposal to add latin small letter glottal stop to the UCS. (PDF) Unicode Consortium, August 10, 2005, accessed October 15, 2015 (English).

Individual references and sources

↑ Geoffrey K. Pullum, William A. Ladusaw: Phonetic Symbol Guide . University of Chicago Press, 1996, ISBN 0-226-68536-5 .

[1] Geoffrey K. Pullum, William A. Ladusaw: Phonetic Symbol Guide . University of Chicago Press, 1996, ISBN 0-226-68536-5 .