Some sources claim that some languages use /quotesingle for glottal stop, palatalization, etc. For example this
Wikipedia article on Maasai.
I suppose the knowledge and consensus on this is limited depending on the language in question, but... Is it probable that for a lot of these, the typographically correct form is /quoteright or even better /uni02BC modifier letter apostrophe?
Comments
In Hawaiian and other Oceanic languages they should use ʻOkina as a glottal stop. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_alphabet#%CA%BBOkina. There is a character for it in Unicode, but I don't remember where. Now found a good description also for other languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOkina.
U+02BB MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA
In reality they use something that looks like it on the keyboard. I know this, because the Oceanic or Polynesian languages are the only ones throwing errors if I strictly check my wordlists of 2300 languages against \p{word} Unicode property/character class.
Maasai seems not to use glottal stop. Cannot find a reliable description of the alphabet or writing system, not in WWS (The Worlds Writing Systems), nor via Google.
I can give you some examples from my Maasai wordlist:
tɛ
amʉ̂
peê
ɛná
ɛnâ
oshî
ŋolé
Ɛshɔmɔ̂
ɨltʉŋaná
But this looks unreliable if not rotten for me, and there are only 1484 different words in my list. Usually I have 50000 word per language. But for languages not so popular it's hard to get larger corpora.
Also many languages do not have stable orthography. One example is Yiddish.
Seems the circumflex is used for glottal stop in my Maasai wordlist.
I should compile character frequency lists of the languages and publish them.
Thanks for the question.
There are certainly some cases when it went into use in African languages, but that's a pretty big field and requires a team of experts.
I can imagine some national body in some developing country didn't exactly know the difference between this and a straight quote and included it. Or it shoul have been an apostrophe but technology wasn't developed enough and they substituted, wrote diacritics in textbooks by hand etc. Africa is a pretty big and diverse place.
As for Maasai there is no established orthography. The only scientific source is Prof. Doris L. Payne of Oregon University. She used sound recordings to explore the language and developed a writing systems for it. The only written source she references is written in a Swahili-based orthography. Other sources are small dictionaries for tourists based on ASCII-letters.
The article you quoted states "which can be represented and alphabetized as follows". I read this as an advice from linguistic scholars to other linguistic scholars, how they can transcribe the sounds into a Latin-based alphabet. It's for scientists sitting in a library far away at the other side of the globe, not for the real usage by Maasai.
But there are nitpickers meaning only guillemets are the right quotes and other nitpickers say exactly the opposite. Just a short test in my small library showed my both in the first 5 books I randomly picked. As a curiosity from the same publisher, same series, Suhrkamp, Steppenwolf has guillemets pointing «outside», while Siddharta has the usual »inside« pointing ones.
In old blackletter (Fraktur, Schwabacher) the lower quotes had the same shape as the comma (a stroke coming from virgl, not a 9). They took the same punch form. And the upper quotes where just turned 180 degrees. Usually punctuation was taken from the typeface of the last word. But, never say never, last week I saw a book mixing antiqua, cursive, Schwabacher, and Fraktur periods without recognisable rule.
A78B Ꞌ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SALTILLO
A78C ꞌ LATIN SMALL LETTER SALTILLO
Used for a glottal stop consonant in some indigenous Mexican language orthographies.