Ancient Greek apostrophe marking elision

[Richard Wordingham via Unicode]

On Sat, 26 Jan 2019 21:11:36 -0800
Asmus Freytag via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> On 1/26/2019 5:43 PM, Richard Wordingham via Unicode wrote:

>> That appears to contradict Michael Everson's remark about a
>> Polynesian
>> need to distinguish the two visually.

> Why do you need to distinguish them? To code text correctly (so the
> invisible properties are what the software expects) or because a
> human reader needs the disambiguation in order to follow the text?

> The latter phenomenon is so common throughout many writing systems,
> that I have difficulties buying it.

It may be a matter of literacy in Hawaiian.  If the test readership
doesn't use ʼokina, it could be confusing to have to resolve the
difference between a sentence(?) starting with one from a sentence in
single quotes. Otherwise, one does wonder why the issue should only
arise now.

One other possibility is that single quote punctuation is being used on
a readership used to double quote punctuation.  Double quotes would
avoid the confusion.

> PS: I wasn't talking about what the Polynesians do; different part of
> the world.

Why should the Polynesians be different?

Richard.