From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Tue Nov 15 2005 - 18:09:34 CST
> > We could choose U+2019 or we could choose U+02BC. Which one is best?
> >
> > I hope this question makes sense.
>
> It makes sense, but it doesn't have a determinant answer.
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.
Of course the down side of this is centuries of tradition
among users of the Latin script for tossing in an apostrophe
for a "letter that isn't there", and the glottal stop traditionally
got tossed into that bag because it wasn't "really" a sound or
a letter, anyway, right?
Furthermore, the tyranny of English typewriters (and later ASCII)
has made apostrophe the only accepted non-A-Z "letter" that
English speakers, in particular, would accept as an exotic
addition to the Latin alphabet, so by default it got adopted
into a jillion missionary and practical orthographies. Ah well.
I still stand by my position that *if* you can convince a
community to adopt a *real* glottal stop letter for their
orthography instead of an apostrophe, in the long run things
will work out better.
--Ken
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