A couple of items of interest from the Linguist List:
Question asked:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-935.html#2
Summary of responses:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-1566.html
Note: something the response does not discuss is that some of the uses of
apostrophe described should be represented in Unicode as U+2019 (clear
example: when used as aquotation mark), while others should be represented
as U+02BC (clear example: when used in an orthography to represent glottal
stop -- there may, of course, be some cases in which best practice is less
clear).
An interesting addendum: in recent interaction with one of my colleagues in
Africa, after recommending that they use U+02BC to represent glottal stop
and ejective stops, he asked if they could either have a glyph variant that
is straight or else use something like U+02C8 instead. The reason given was
that language workers are being trained to key data but, the success of the
training has been dependent on every different keystroke corresponding to a
unique shape, i.e. it wouldn't work to require different keyings for
distinct functions that use the same shape -- but they use single quotation
marks, so need a distinct shape for glottals / glottalisation.
- Peter
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Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>
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