Re: Ancient Greek apostrophe marking elision

On Sun, 27 Jan 2019 01:55:29 +0000
James Kass via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote:

Richard Wordingham replied to Asmus Freytag,

 >> 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.  

Does it?

U+02BC /should/ be used but ordinary users can't tell the difference 
because the glyphs in their displays are identical, resulting in much 
data which uses U+2019 or U+0027.  I don't see any contradiction.

I had assumed that Polynesians would be writing with paper and ink.  It
depends on what 'tell the difference' means.  In normal parlance it
means that they are unaware of the difference in the symbols; you are
assuming that it means that printed material doesn't show the
difference.

In general, handwritten differences can show up in various ways.  For
example, one can find a slight, unreliable difference in the relative
positioning of characters that reflects the difference in the usage of
characters.

Of course, Asmus's facts have to be unreliable.  It's like someone
typing U+1142A NEWA LETTER MHA for Sanskrit <U+11434 NEWA LETTER HA,
U+11442 NEWA SIGN VIRAMA, U+11429 NEWA LETTER MA>, which we've been
assured would never happen.  There must be something wrong with reality.

There usually is :)

Our leaders tell us so.

Anyway, most of us don't use U+2019 where proper unless we happen to use
software that makes the translation from U+0027 for us . . .

When it picks the left single quote by mistake, that's something we can spot and nudge it. When the difference is invisible people will type the wrong thing - like typesetting whole books with the wrong Arabic character because it happens to share the same shape in that position with another one.

A./