I took part in that thread and then, as now, as have not received a definitive answer and certainly no references at all to explain the orthography or the grammatical reasons for it.
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"?
it substitutes the letters that are not pronounced
Articles
'o (male) 'a (feamale)
de = preposition
like in Italian the preposition + the article become "one word" --> d''a
there is no "unique" character - one' belongs to the preposition the other to the article
pe + 'a --> p''a
That is the rule of course it also depends on pronunciation whenever a preposition that ends in a vowel meets a definite article this way of writing is neccessary. There is no Neapolitan keyboard as such - some created a keyboard layout that helps to type more easily, but that's all - no official stuff.
The way of writing Neapolitan dates back to the 18th century when it still was used as written language in everyday life - then due to historical reasons Italian substituted Neapolitan. Of course some changes are needed to adapt these old ways of writing and communicating to our days ... only think about IT-terminology.
So well, the reason for having these double '' and for being them two distinct chars hopefully is cleared by this. If not: please let me know.
Best, Sabine
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