John Cowan wrote: > What I've never understood is why Unicode is so adamant that the ' of > English words is a punctuation mark, not a letter; why when disambiguating > U+0027, English apostrophe is to be mapped to U+2019 and not U+02BC. > It's true that historically "isn't" is derived from "is not", but > synchronically it seems to me to function as a letter in every respect. > It has no sound, but neither does Romance "h"; both exist as a marker of > etymology.
Linguistically speaking, I'm pretty sure that most uses of apostrophe in English are associated with clitics. A clitic is effectively a separate word that happens to be pronounced in combination with an adjacent word. For example, in: The man on the hill's telescope was quite powerful. the apostrophe-s is not, syntactically, a part of "hill", it is a part of the entire phrase "the man on the hill". Thus, I would have an issue with the argument that the apostrophe is merely part of the spelling of the word "hill's". There is no such word. The Wikipedia has a decent description of this phenomenon: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic Interestingly, some linguists think that the contraction of not, as in your example, is the only instance in English where apostrophe does not, in fact, mark a clitic: Zwicky, Arnold M., & Geoffrey K. Pullum, 1983. Cliticization vs. inflection: English n't. Language 59.502-513. Sorry, I can't find this online. - John Burger The MITRE Corporation Please avoid sending me unnecessary Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
