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