Andrew Dunbar wrote:

> --- Richard Wordingham
><richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
>
>
>
>>Do marks expressly introduced to create new letters
>>at will count as diacritics? The nukta in
>>Devanagari and the prime in modern Hebrew are such
>>marks.
>>
>>
>
>By "prime" do you mean what Unicode calls "geresh" and
>"gershayim"?
>
>

Presumably the geresh (HEBREW PUNCTUATION GERESH, not to be confused
with HEBREW ACCENT GERESH, which is something else entirely), since
that's what's used to "create new letters" (sorta). For those not
familiar, the geresh, which looks like an apostrophe (and the apostrophe
character is universally used for it, until people get Unicode drilled
into their heads) is used in Hebrew to represent sounds not in the
native alphabet. So, G' (that is, GIMEL followed by GERESH) is /d‮ʒ/,
Z' is ‮/‮ʒ/, C' (that is, TSADI GERESH) is /tʃ/, and I think I've seen
T' to represent /Θ/ and D' for /ð/, though in those cases the foreign
sounds are rarely actually pronounced.

The GERESH also has other uses, though. It's used for one-letter
abbreviations, and also one-letter numbers and a few other number uses.

The GERSHAYIM (again, not to be confused with the accent of the same
name) is not used phonetically like this, but only for abbreviations and
numbers, and also in spelling out the names of letters, for some reason.

~mark