moyogo
commented
1 month ago The apostrophe of "n’" is for the elision of the preposition "na" before words starting with vowels. See for example B. I. Mmadike, "A Case for Prepositions in Igbo", Linguistics Online, September 2016, no. 18, pp. 1-10 (PDF):
(4) a. Azụ̀ dı̣̀ nà ǹkàtà. [...] b. Azụ̀ dı̣̀ n’efere. [...] In (4a), the preposition na is written in full when the complement begins with a consonant, otherwise its vowel segment is elided when the complement begins with a vowel (4b).
It is odd that the ṅ of the 1961 Ọnwụ orthography, or its alternatives from other orthographies, doesn’t occur in the UDHR translation but it is relatively rare when looking at corpora.
The document contains many occurrences of U+0027 APOSTROPHE, apparently all after "n". According to http://www.motherlandnigeria.com/languages.html, apostrophe is not used, but <n, U+0304 COMBINING MACRON> is; <n, U+0303 COMBINING TILDE> according to http://ilc.igbonet.com/; and <n, U+0307 COMBINING DOT ABOVE> according to http://uwandiigbo.com/. In any case, there is no combining sequence with n in the document, so it seems that those apostrophes should really be some combining mark on the preceding "n".