On 2025-08-25 08:45, Robert Elz wrote:
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2025 07:34:25 -0700
From: Paul Eggert via tz <[email protected]>
| Astrodienst’s Web version of Shanks and Pottenger’s
That's simply wrong, regardless of questions of how nice it is to
type, that character that is being misrepresented there by ’
should be an apostrophe ('), which is an entirely different thing
than a closing single quote.
There are two issues here. First, whether to use HTML entities like
'/‘/’ versus ordinary characters like '/‘/’. Second,
whether to use '/' or ’/’ in English possessives and
contractions.
For the first issue, ordinary characters simplify editing HTML.
For the second issue, which is what I think you’re focusing on, there
has been considerable confusion and some controversy due to the
historical use of ' (U+0027 APOSTROPHE) to mean many things including
apostrophe and single quotation marks. On this topic the current Unicode
Standard says the following[1]:
When text is set, U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is preferred as
apostrophe.... U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is preferred where the
character is to represent a punctuation mark, as for contractions:
“We’ve been here before.” In this latter case, U+2019 is also referred
to as a punctuation apostrophe.... The semantics of U+2019 are therefore
context dependent. For example, if surrounded by letters or digits on
both sides, it behaves as an in-text punctuation character and does not
separate words or lines.
Given the Unicode’s limitations no approach to this problem is perfect.
That being said the Unicode Standard is a reasonable way to go.
[1]:
https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode16.0.0/core-spec/chapter-6/#G12411
