From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Nov 16 2005 - 03:24:56 CST
From: "Kenneth Whistler" <kenw@sybase.com>
> In fact, giving this another think, the *best* answer is to
> avoid apostrophe altogether in an orthography, period.
>
> Given the fact that there are perfectly decent full *letter*
> characters in Unicode for a glottal stop, not confusable with
> any punctuation mark, one of those is a far better orthographic
> choice for a glottal stop than U+2019, U+02BC, or U+0027.
You just considered the case of glottal stops and quotation punctuation
marks. There are still other uses of the apostrophe in the orthographies
themselves where it is neither a glottal stop letter or sound and neither a
quotation punctuation sign.
Your *best* suggestion offers no good alternative for them (remember the
orthographic Breton {c’h} letter for /x/). With your suggestion, the
trigraph would have to be replaced by some unknown letter, and centuries of
tradition, and about 30 years of standardization would be ignored, all
existing books would have to be recomposed, street plates replaced, and so
on... If you consider this, then why keeping the many digraphs and trigraphs
in English and not using, for example, { ʃ } and {Ʃ} and instead of {sh} and
{SH} in English, like in Berber ? So, why not making the revolution and
forcing all orthographies to use extended alphabets based on IPA plus
capitals ?
Your *best* response makes littel sense for me.
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