Another take on the English apostrophe in Unicode

[Marcel Schneider]

 On Sat, Jun 13, 2015, Mark Davis  wrote:

> In particular, I see no need to change our recommendation on the character used 
> in contractions for English and many other languages (U+2019). Similarly, we wouldn't 
> recommend use of anything but the colon for marking abbreviations in Swedish, or 
> propose a new MODIFIER LETTER ELLIPSIS for "supercali...docious".

> (IMO, U+02BC was probably just a mistake; the minor benefit is not worth the confusion.)


When we take the topic down again from linguistics to the core mission of Unicode, that is character encoding and text processing standardisation, ellipsis and Swedish abbreviation colon differ from the single closing quotation mark in this, that they are not to be processed.

 

Linguistics, however, delivered the foundation on which Unicode issued its first recommendation on what character to use for apostrophe. The result was neither a matter of opinion, nor of probabilities.


 

Actually, the choice is between perpetuating confusion in word processing, and get people confused for a little time when announcing that U+2019 for apostrophe was a mistake.


 

 

Marcel Schneider



 

 

> Message du 13/06/15 17:36
> De : "Mark Davis ☕️" 
> A : "Peter Constable" 

> Copie à : "verdy_p at wanadoo.fr" , "Kalvesmaki,
Joel" , "Unicode Mailing List" 
> Objet : Re: Another take on the English apostrophe in Unicode
> 
>


>
On Sat, Jun 13, 2015 at 5:10 PM, Peter Constable 
wrote:
>

When it comes to orthography, the notion of what comprise words of a language is generally pure convention. That’s because there isn’t any single _linguistic_ definition of word that gives the same answer when phonological vs. morphological or syntactic criteria are applied. There are book-length works on just this topic, such as this:

 




>
In particular, I see no need to change our recommendation on the character used in contractions for English and many other languages (U+2019). Similarly, we wouldn't recommend use of anything but the colon for marking abbreviations in Swedish, or propose a new MODIFIER LETTER ELLIPSIS for "supercali...docious".

> 
(IMO, U+02BC was probably just a mistake; the minor benefit is not worth the confusion.)



 

>
Mark

> 
— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —
 







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