On 8/16/06, Andrew Dunbar hippytrail@gmail.com wrote:
My main question is does Neapolitan use a) a single character that looks like an English double quote mark or two adjacent apostrophes or b) a character that looks like an English apostrophe which in certain situations can occur as a "double letter"?
The best I can figure is that it uses a single character ' to indicate that a letter has been left out. This can occur at the end of a word, or at the start, or at the middle. Also, in a couple of specific cases, when it occurs at the end of a word *and* at the start of the following word, then those two words are written as one, with both the apostrophes: d''a
This is purely reverse engineering and speculation, based on the patterns I saw at nap. and the comments above. I'd also like to hear the definitive answer. Not that it will change much, obviously the spelling is important enough that people don't consider simply writing the word "d'a" a viable option.
Steve