John Cowan wrote:
> What I've never understood is why Unicode is so adamant that the ' of
> English words is a punctuation mark, not a letter; why when disambiguating
> U+0027, English apostrophe is to be mapped to U+2019 and not U+02BC.
> It's true that historically "isn't" is derived from "is not", but
> synchronically it seems to me to function as a letter in every respect.
> It has no sound, but neither does Romance "h"; both exist as a marker of
> etymology.
Linguistically speaking, I'm pretty sure that most uses of apostrophe in
English are associated with clitics. A clitic is effectively a separate
word that happens to be pronounced in combination with an adjacent
word. For example, in:
The man on the hill's telescope was quite powerful.
the apostrophe-s is not, syntactically, a part of "hill", it is a part
of the entire phrase "the man on the hill". Thus, I would have an issue
with the argument that the apostrophe is merely part of the spelling of
the word "hill's". There is no such word. The Wikipedia has a decent
description of this phenomenon:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic
Interestingly, some linguists think that the contraction of not, as in
your example, is the only instance in English where apostrophe does not,
in fact, mark a clitic:
Zwicky, Arnold M., & Geoffrey K. Pullum, 1983.
Cliticization vs. inflection: English n't.
Language 59.502-513.
Sorry, I can't find this online.
- John Burger The MITRE Corporation
Please avoid sending me unnecessary Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
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