Another take on the English apostrophe in Unicode

David Starner prosfilaes at gmail.com
Thu Jun 4 23:25:52 CDT 2015


Hyphens generally make multiple words into one anyway. There's not really
multiple hyphens the way there's separate quotes and apostrophes.

On 7:01pm, Thu, Jun 4, 2015 Leo Broukhis <leob at mailcom.com> wrote:

> Along the same lines, we might need a MODIFIER LETTER HYPHEN, because, for
> example, the work ack-ack isn't decomposable into words, or even morphemes,
> "ack" and "ack".
>
> Leo
>
> On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 6:31 PM, David Starner <prosfilaes at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 2:38 PM Markus Scherer <markus.icu at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> "don’t" is a contraction of two words, it is not one word.
>>>
>>
>> But as he points out, it's not a contraction of don and t; it is, at
>> best, a contraction of do and n't. It's eliding, not punctuating. In the
>> comments, he also brings up the examples of "Don’t you mind?" being okay
>> but not *"Do not you mind?", and "fo’c’sle".
>>
>> > You can't use simple regular expressions to find word boundaries.
>>
>> Who uses _simple_ regular expressions? You can't use any code to reliably
>> find word boundaries in English, and that's a problem.
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20150605/38dc8676/attachment.html>


More information about the Unicode mailing list