>> CLDR uses the correct orientation for apostrophes. It also contains >> mapping information so that someone wanting to use or allow fallback >> characters such as the ASCII apostrophe can do so. So {c’h} would be >> used. > > A quick question on apostrophes">

Unicode Mail List Archive: Re: Exemplar Characters (original) (raw)

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From: "Chris Harvey" <chris@languagegeek.com>
>> CLDR uses the correct orientation for apostrophes. It also contains
>> mapping information so that someone wanting to use or allow fallback
>> characters such as the ASCII apostrophe can do so. So {c’h} would be
>> used.
>
> A quick question on apostrophes

This raises another question: the apostrophe is needed in Bereton both as
part of a necessary alphabetic letter, and with the apheretic role, like in
French (from which it imports lots of words) and English. The Unicode
character has then two distinct roles.

This means that listing {c’h} only implies the first role to create the
letter, but not the second role where it is not considered part of examplar
or auxiliary characters (French and English examplar and auxiliary
characters do not list the apostrophe, despite it has an effective
grammatical role and is needed for correct orthography).

How to solve such ambiguity? The current definition of examplar and
auxiliary characters does not clearly state the role of this kind of
grammatical/non alphabetic character. How can an application (for example a
plain-text search indexer) can consider the various ways to encode the
grammatical and alphabetic apostrophe, which are typically written with the
same set of alternatives ?

Note that the apostrophe also has a third function as a quoting punctuation
which is neither alphabetic and neither grammatical (true at least in French
and English and many european languages...).

Most often, there's no difference of interpretation in plain texts between a
quote and an apostrophe (even if the second one is normally prefered, but
much less used than the single ASCII quote). The difference really appears
only in non-plain texts such as program sources as a upper-layer syntaxic
delimiter, specific to the source language, and that separates this source
from plain-text character sequences or strings.

In plain texts, the difference between the ASCII single quotes, apostrophe
letters, grammatical apostrophes, and quotation marks is most often glyphic
only (the ASCII quote being the most ambiguous, but the curly apostrophe
being ambiguous as well, as it only eliminates the right/left subdistinction
in the punctuation role but does not eliminate the distinction of the three
roles).

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