Tutuq belgisi: which mark is the right one

The new alphabet has 28 letters and the tutuq belgisi. The tutuq belgisi is ʼ, U+02BC. No other mark will do.

Why the confusion

The mark itself is not on any keyboard, so everyone reached for whatever was nearby. Five different characters are in circulation: ' the plain apostrophe, ’ the typographic quote, ` the backtick, and two nearly identical modifier letters — ʻ and ʼ.

Those last two did different jobs in the old orthography. ʻ (U+02BB) lived inside oʻ and gʻ, as part of the letter. ʼ (U+02BC) is the tutuq belgisi. They look almost the same, and for twenty years they were used interchangeably.

After the reform oʻ and gʻ became ö and ğ, so ʻ is not needed at all any more. One mark is left: ʼ.

Where it goes

The tutuq belgisi turns up mostly in words borrowed from Arabic. It marks a long preceding vowel, or two sounds pronounced separately: sanʼat, maʼno, aʼlo, shuʼla, sunʼiy.

It is a letter, not punctuation. It lives inside the word: it does not wrap the word like a quote, and does not break it like a dash.

The separator in Isʼhoq is no longer needed

In the old orthography the mark in Isʼhoq and asʼhob did exactly one job: it stopped sh from being read as a single sound. Now that ş is its own letter, an s next to an h is unambiguous — you simply write Ishoq.

The new edition of the orthography rules has not been published yet, so our converter leaves the choice to you: drop the separator or keep it.

What to do

Type ʼ. Where to get it is explained on the Keyboard page: if you have installed our layout it sits on its own key, and if you have not, you can copy it from that page.

Our converter understands whichever mark you typed, and always writes ʼ in the result.