User:Pelagic/sandbox/j/2019/10/30

Wednesday 30 October

Apostrophe

Changes from Unicode version 2.0 to 2.1 …
Significant clarifications or modifications to character semantics include the following:
Apostrophe. Because the character U+0027 APOSTROPHE is very ambiguous, the preferrred character for apostrophe was documented as either U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE or U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK.[1]

It’s always bothered me that we don’t have a clear way to encode a semantic distinction between apostrophe and single-close-quote. Different glyphs would be great: straight only for apostrophe and raised comma only for quote. (Good luck trying to convince anybody else to adopt that convention.) But ASCII 27 has so many meanings, using it for just one of them seems fraught. Compare hyphen-minus, where we have explicit hyphen and minus as alternatives.

Now I learn that "modifier letter apostrophe" is actually meant to represent the punctuation mark and not some obscure diacritic? Le sigh. Wonder if that stance was reversed in later versions?

U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE U+02BC ʼ MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE U+2019 ’ RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK

Aside: hyphen-minus, hyphen‐hyphen, hyphen⁃bullet.

U+002D - HYPHEN-MINUS, U+2010 ‐ HYPHEN, U+2043 ⁃ HYPHEN BULLET