I see you have commented further, but to clarify the linguistics:

The two characters are really completely different in Arabic, but since neither are closely to anything in our languages, they are represented by these small apostrophe-like signs. What you have in Qur'an is indeed a hamza, which is a "glottal stop", best described as a brief halt in the word: qur-aan. It is a "half-consonant", i.e. not so commonly used - it is e.g. normally ignored if it appears at the beginning of a word (since no Arabic word can begin with a vowel, such apparently initial vowels are always prefaced by a hamza, either a "real" one that is pronounced in Arabic or a "conjunctive" that disappears when following another word (thus, the definite article al- (el- etc.) is actually always ’al-, but of the latter type, and never transliterated). The hamza appears perhaps most often as the result of grammatical changes in a word, although it takes to long to go into how and why. 

The other one, 'ayn, which looking like the small superscript c, is just a regular Arabic consontant like any other, no more strange than f or m. It  is pronounced like a "small explosion" at the back of the mouth, but for non-Arabs it may perhaps sound a bit like a short clearing of the throat. It is always written, like any other consonant. Thus if you see an "apostrophe" at the beginning of a word, it is always 'ayn, in the middle or end, it could be either. 

Some examples, we have hamza in:
Qur'an (Qurʾān)
Iranian leader Khamene'i (Khāminiʾī - thus in Arabic, which we borrow; in Persian it is spelled ....neh-ī)

'Ayn in:
Umar (Omar, Omer: ʿUmar)
Uthman (Osman, Ottoman, etc.; ʿUthmān)
shi'ism (shīʿa)
Sharia (sharīʿa)
Egyptian politician ElBaradei (al-Barādaʿī)
Palestinian politician Ahmed Qurei (Qurayʿ - sometimes pronounced almost like "Korea")
Deraa, rebellious town in Syria: Darʿā

ulama (religious scholars) has ayn at beginning and hamza at the end: ʿulamāʾ
In the woman's name Aisha, the first letter is similarly surrounded: ʿĀʾisha.
And in the last a of Sanaa, capital of Yemen: Ṣanʿāʾ. 

And so on,

As you can see, it sometimes makes a difference to "our" pronounciation, sometimes not. The most important is perhaps when the characters appear in the middle of what otherwise looks like a diphtong (ay, aw); the vowels should then be pronounced apart. We tend to say "barradayy", when Arabs would say baraada-ii. (And "Ayysha" for "aa-isha").  

Knut

Den 7. jan. 2012 kl. 14:28 skrev Ferren MacIntyre:

> My problem with hamza is not so much *typing* it, as figuring out what it is. The one in Qur'an gets written to look like both a 'c' and a reversed 'c' in different places, but these (as I understand things) are really 2 different characters. The glyphs in Characer Viewer are so numerous and variable that they leave this Arabic-illiterate baffled. I don't wan't to use a single quote, because I find it necessary to switch between 'Educate Quotes' and 'Straighten Quotes' when using Find&Replace to insert unicode gobbledogook. What *is* that thing in Qur'an? It is often written differently from the one in 'Umar. Surely somebody on this list knows about these arcane matters!
>