Another take on the English apostrophe in Unicode

Leo Broukhis leob at mailcom.com
Fri Jun 5 02:16:07 CDT 2015


> But the point was that treating hyphens as parts of words is not generally a wrong thing.

That brings us back to my original question: where's MODIFIER LETTER
HYPHEN, then? A word is a sequence of letters, isn't it? :)

I agree that conflating apostrophes and quotes is a source of
problems, however, existence of the MODIFIER LETTER [same glyph as
used for English contractions] in Unicode is a coincidence which
should not have an effect on usage of apostrophes in English.

Leo

On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 11:58 PM, David Starner <prosfilaes at gmail.com> wrote:
> On June 4, 2015, at 11:01 PM, Leo Broukhis <leob at mailcom.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 9:25 PM, David Starner <prosfilaes at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>Hyphens generally make multiple words into one anyway. There's not really
>> multiple hyphens the way there's separate quotes and apostrophes.
>>
>>Generally, but not always, just as apostrophes aren't always at a
>> contracted word boundary. There is only one hyphen because no language
>> (AFAIK) claims it as part of its alphabet.
>
> But the point was that treating hyphens as parts of words is not generally a
> wrong thing. There is one generally consistent rule for hyphens. When
> apostrophes and quotes are conflated, there is no one generally acceptable
> rule.


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