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
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