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Themodifier letter turned commaʻ is acharacter found inUnicode resembling acomma that has beenturned. Unlike a comma, it is aletter, not a piece ofpunctuation. It is used in a number ofPolynesian alphabets as the letterʻokina to represent theglottal stop, and in theUzbek alphabet to form the lettersOʻ andGʻ, which correspond toЎ andҒ respectively in the Uzbek Cyrillic alphabet.
The letter turned comma is encoded atU+02BB ʻMODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA, which can be rendered inHTML by the entityʻ (or in hexadecimal formʻ), in theSpacing Modifier Letters Unicode block.
In Unicode code charts it looks identical to theU+2018 ‘LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK,[1] but this is not true for all fonts. The primary difference between the letter turned comma andU+2018 is that the letter turned commaU+02BB has the UnicodeGeneral Category "Letter, modifier" (Lm), whileU+2018 has the category "Punctuation, Initial quote" (Pi).
The character is used in manyPolynesian languages asʻokina, aunicameralconsonant letter used within theLatin script to mark thephonemicglottal stop.
In the Uzbek alphabet, the letter turned comma is used to write the lettersOʻ (Cyrillic Ў) andGʻ (Cyrillic Ғ).
It is sometimes used in Latin transliterations of theHebrew letterʻáyin and the Arabic letterʻayn.
The letter turned comma is also often used to romanize aspirated consonants inArmenian.