[undertow]

Ugh. How awful. Apostrophes and (full stop) dots repurposed as letters within words. But at least there aren't any accented characters or other diacritics.

Phonemes aside, why would anyone design that, and imagine it as a feature and not a bug?

[gleki]

dots represent pauses or glottal stops. what other symbol could be used for it? Apostrophe represent either [h] or "th" like in "thin". Again what other letter could be used?