Re: Ancient Greek apostrophe marking elision

On Sat, 26 Jan 2019 17:11:49 -0800
Asmus Freytag via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote:

To make matters worse, users for languages that "should" use U+02BC
aren't actually consistent; much data uses U+2019 or U+0027. Ordinary
users can't tell the difference (and spell checkers seem not
successful in enforcing the practice).

That appears to contradict Michael Everson's remark about a Polynesian
need to distinguish the two visually.

Richard.

Why do you need to distinguish them? To code text correctly (so the invisible properties are what the software expects) or because a human reader needs the disambiguation in order to follow the text?

The former is like first coding a different character for a decimal point from an ordinary period, then deciding to make it look different so you know you typed the right one. The latter is like saying people can't handle using the same symbol (dot on the baseline) for two different functions.

The latter phenomenon is so common throughout many writing systems, that I have difficulties buying it.

A./

PS: I wasn't talking about what the Polynesians do; different part of the world.