Ancient Greek apostrophe marking elision

[James Kass via Unicode]

On 2019-01-28 8:58 PM, Richard Wordingham wrote:
 > On Mon, 28 Jan 2019 03:48:52 +0000
 > James Kass via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
 >
 >> It’s been said that the text segmentation rules seem over-complicated
 >> and are probably non-trivial to implement properly.  I tried your
 >> suggestion of WORD JOINER U+2060 after tau ( γένοιτ⁠’ ἄν ), but it
 >> only added yet another word break in LibreOffice.
 >
 > I said we *don't* have a control that joins words.  The text of TUS
 > used to say we had one in U+2060, but that was removed in 2015.  I
 > pleaded for the retention of this functionality in document
 > L2/2015/15-192, but my request was refused.  I pointed out in ICU
 > ticket #11766 that ICU's Thai word breaker retained this facility. ...

Sorry for sounding obtuse there.  It was your *post* which suggested the 
use of WORD JOINER.  You did clearly assert that it would not work.  So, 
human nature, I /had/ to try it and see.

It. did. not. work.  (No surprise.)  But it /should/ have worked. It’s a 
JOINER, for goodness sake!

When the author/editor puts any kind of JOINER into a text string, 
what’s the intent?  What’s the poînt of having a JOINER that doesn’t?

Recently I put a ZWJ between the “c” and the “t” in the word 
“Respec‍tfully” as an experiment.  Spellchecker flagged both “respec” 
and “tfully” as being misspelt, which they probably are.  A ZWNJ would 
have been used if there had been any desire for the string to be *split* 
there, e.g., to forbid formation of a discretionary ligature.  Instead 
the ZWJ was inserted, signalling authorial intent that a ‘more joined’ 
form of the “c-t” substring was requested.

Text a man has JOINED together, let not algorithm put asunder.