ahoi paul,

i think the designer just forgot to shift the commaaccents below
the glyph, wich may originally were quoterights or something(?).
but this is only a guess, cause i don't know of those characters
shown, but i know of R- and Ncommaaccent (wich are build like
the K- L- S- Tcommaaccent ones in your pic).

cheers,
ute

These are not legitimate forms. Cute though.

There is only one instance in which the 'commaaccent' normally appears above a letter, and that is the lowercase g -- where there is no room for the mark below the letter) --, but in that case the accent is rotated 180 degrees. When we were making the Zapfino font for Apple, the first version to include Eastern European and Baltic character support, I adapted this practice to the uppercase G forms, which have a descending swash element that prevents placement of the accent below the letter.

> I adapted this practice to the uppercase G forms

Ah, alphabet reform. ;-)
I'm curious, did the "natives" not mind?

hhp

i knew you'd have a definitive answer for me John, thanks for chiming in!

I'm curious, did the "natives" not mind?

No idea. Any Latvian OS X users lurking hereabouts? I doubt if native readers would mind, because they already have a precedence for relocating and rotating the accent when it doesn't fit beneath the letter: all I did was to apply this practice to the uppercase as well as the lowercase: