Re: Exemplifying apostrophes

From: Chris Harvey (chris@languagegeek.com)
Date: Sun May 18 2008 - 16:20:17 CDT

  • Next message: Jukka K. Korpela: "Re: Exemplifying apostrophes"

    Ysgrifennodd Eric Muller 2008/05/17 6:31 ᴘ.ᴍ.:

    > In the particular case of U+0027, and for the UDHR, most of the uses
    > should probably either U+02BC ʼ MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE or U+2019 ’
    > RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK. Lorna Priest kindly sent me a list of
    > languages which are known to use an apostrophe to write a glottal stop,
    > but I have not had time yet to fold that in the texts.

    I still don’t see any reason why the phonological value of a character
    should determine its encoding. This is not the case for other
    characters: a b c.... Whether ’ represents a glottal stop (Mohawk), a
    centralised vowel (Mi’gmaq), part of a digraph/trigraph... t’ (Dogrib),
    c’h (Breton), tth’ (Chipewyan), or an elision (English won’t), it
    should always have the same encoding. In my opinion, this should be
    U+2019, as one cannot expect users to recognise that ’ is one character
    in one language, but a different character in a different language.

    On another note, some languages, like Kwak̕wala prefer U+0027 over any
    curly variety. Normalising ' to ’ in this case would be an error.

    Chris Harvey



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun May 18 2008 - 16:34:03 CDT