This article needs additional citations for
verification. (September 2015) |
N-apostrophe (ʼn) is a
Unicode character used in
Afrikaans, a language spoken in
South Africa and
Namibia. The code point (U+0149) is currently deprecated,
[1] and the Unicode standard recommends that a sequence of an apostrophe followed by n be used instead,
[2] as the use of deprecated characters such as ʼn is "strongly discouraged",
[3] despite being required for
CP853 compatibility. In fact, it was removed from the
Charis SIL and
Doulos SIL fonts. It is however in quite general use in the Afrikaans versions of Facebook and other publications, probably to avoid the tendency of auto-correction (designed for English quotation marks) to turn a typed 'n
(
straight apostrophe, n) into ‘n
(
open single quote, n), which is incorrect but common.
The letter is the indefinite article of Afrikaans, and is pronounced as a schwa. The symbol itself came about as a contraction of its Dutch equivalent een meaning "one" (just as English an comes from Anglo-Saxon ān, also meaning "one").
In Afrikaans, ʼn is never capitalised in standard texts. Instead, the first letter of the following word is capitalised.
An exception to this rule is in newspaper headlines, or sentences and phrases where all the letters are capitalised.
The upper case, or majuscule form has never been included in any international keyboards. Therefore, it is decomposable by simply combining ʼ (U+02BC) and N. 〔ʼN〕
It is also a legacy compatibility character for the ISO/IEC 6937 and CP853 text encodings.
This article needs additional citations for
verification. (September 2015) |
N-apostrophe (ʼn) is a
Unicode character used in
Afrikaans, a language spoken in
South Africa and
Namibia. The code point (U+0149) is currently deprecated,
[1] and the Unicode standard recommends that a sequence of an apostrophe followed by n be used instead,
[2] as the use of deprecated characters such as ʼn is "strongly discouraged",
[3] despite being required for
CP853 compatibility. In fact, it was removed from the
Charis SIL and
Doulos SIL fonts. It is however in quite general use in the Afrikaans versions of Facebook and other publications, probably to avoid the tendency of auto-correction (designed for English quotation marks) to turn a typed 'n
(
straight apostrophe, n) into ‘n
(
open single quote, n), which is incorrect but common.
The letter is the indefinite article of Afrikaans, and is pronounced as a schwa. The symbol itself came about as a contraction of its Dutch equivalent een meaning "one" (just as English an comes from Anglo-Saxon ān, also meaning "one").
In Afrikaans, ʼn is never capitalised in standard texts. Instead, the first letter of the following word is capitalised.
An exception to this rule is in newspaper headlines, or sentences and phrases where all the letters are capitalised.
The upper case, or majuscule form has never been included in any international keyboards. Therefore, it is decomposable by simply combining ʼ (U+02BC) and N. 〔ʼN〕
It is also a legacy compatibility character for the ISO/IEC 6937 and CP853 text encodings.