RE: FW: New version of TR29:

From: jarkko.hietaniemi@nokia.com
Date: Tue Aug 20 2002 - 16:41:01 EDT


As another datapoint the following details the use of the apostrophe in Finnish
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/kielikello/merkit.html#heittomerkki
It's in Finnish :-) so allow me to summarize:

(1) if consonant gradation (the change or even elision) of consonants would cause
two same vowels belonging to different syllables to become adjacent, the apostrophe
goes into the syllable division:

        vaaka (= scales, or Vaaka = Libra) (vaa-ka), in genetive the 'k' is elided
        because of the consonant gradation and the result would be "vaaan" (vaa-an),
        but the apostrophe to the rescue, the real result being "vaa'an"

(2) sometimes (rarely) in compound words in which the final vowel of the first
word has disappeared the missing vowel is marked with an apostrophe ("joka ainoa" ->
"jok ainoa" -> "jok'ainoa"), but most often the compound words have melded so far
that they have become seen as a single one ("vastedes" was probably once upon a time
"vasta edes", "vast edes", "vast'edes", but that's ancient history)

(3) when inflecting foreign words that end in writing with a consonant but in
pronunciation with a vowel, the foreign word and its inflection suffix(es) are
separated by an apostrophe.

I guess all these three uses can be classified as an "intra-word punctuation",
they mark an intraword boundary.

Then there are two uses of apostrophies in quoting: within secondary quotation
marks, and in linguistics to signify the translation of a foreign word. This,
of course, is clear punctuation usage.



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