From: William J Poser (wjposer@ldc.upenn.edu)
Date: Thu May 10 2007 - 16:20:19 CDT
Petr Tomasek <http://www.etf.cuni.cz/~tomasek> wrote:
>On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 03:36:26PM -0400, William J Poser wrote:
>> A nice example of the problems created by using apostrophe
>> for glottal stop (and glottalization of the preceding consonant)
>> is found in Carrier. This convention was introduced in the days
>> of typewriters, when apostrophe and right single quote were the same.
>> MS Word and other word processors, however, are prone to think that
>But this is a problem caused by the Microsoft's hegemony and
>it's way of thinking "we are more clever than the stupid user"
>not a fault of using apostrophe to denote glottal stop.
As someone willing to blame everything from global warming to
the genocide in Darfur on Microsoft, I think I have to come
to Microsoft's defence on this one. It is true that MS Word
is trying to be clever when it does this, but to be fair, this
kind of cleverness is something that many users want. Even
in the world outside the shadow of the Dark Towers of Redmond,
we find similar things. If I type into TeX in a standard
configuration: ''Here is a quotation'' (with four tokens of U+0027)
the output will be a left double quote at the beginning and a right
double quote at the end.
Bill
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