Re: Exemplar Characters

From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Tue Nov 15 2005 - 12:44:01 CST

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    At 11:26 -0500 2005-11-15, Chris Harvey wrote:

    >Theoretically, perhaps it's best to always use U+02BC where the
    >apostrophe has a phonological role in the orthography.

    Nonsense. There's nothing "better" about that, theoretically.

    >I've been considering this question for years, and have, personally,
    >tended to go with U+02BC in all cases where the apostrophe is part
    >of an orthography. Why not also use the modifier U+02BC in Breton?

    Because Bretons use the punctuation apostrophe, and always have.

    >As there is no correspondance between character and pronunciation,
    >then the "glottal" aspect of U+02BC could be ignored. U+2019 could
    >be reserved for punctuation purposes only.

    French and Breton both use the apostrophe for elision. Breton also
    uses the apostrophe in the trigraph <c'h> for /x/. Asking Bretons to
    consider distinguishing the two with different characters Is A Bad
    Thing

    >On the other hand, it would be much more convenient for a language
    >like Mohawk to always use U+2019 for both glottal stops and closing
    >single quotes, as U+2019 is far more commonly included in fonts than
    >U+02BC, and far more accessible.

    Good gracious, no.

    >And if the argument in favour for use of U+2019 in Breton is based
    >on convention, then all languages ought to be using U+2019 even for
    >their glottal stops, as they've always been using the ASCII
    >quote~end quote.

    They shouldn't be using single quotes much for quotation marks
    anyway, because when glottal is a common character (or also when
    apostrophe as an elider is common) it is better to use double quotes
    because they are more distinctive. (That is what I do when I typeset
    Irish.)

    -- 
    Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
    


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