I agree with the recommendation of U+02BC. However, it is in fact rarely used because most of the people who write these languages or create supporting infrastructure are unawre of such issues.
A small point: it isn't always the spacing diacritic that is used. In some languages, e.g. Halkomelem, people use the spacing apostrophe if they have to but prefer the non-spacing version. On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 11:39 AM, Philippe Verdy <[email protected]> wrote: > Also used in the Breton trigram c’h (considered as a single letter of the > Breton alphabet, but actually entered as two letters with a diacritic-like > apostrophe in the middle (which in this case is still not a letter of the > alphabet...): the trigram c’h is distinct from the digram ch. > Breton **also** uses a regular apostrophe for elision. > > In fact what you note for the ejective in native american languages is > effectively a right-combining diacritic, and still not a letter by itself. > However, given its position and the fact it is "spacing", this is the > spacing form of the apostrophe diacritic that should be used, and that form > is then to choose between: > > * U+00B4 (acute, most often ugly, located too high, and too much > horizontal), > * U+02B9 (prime, nearly good, but still too high), > * U+02BC (apostrophe), > * U+02C8 (vertical high tick, but confusable with the mark of stress in > IPA before a phonetic syllable), and > * U+02CA (acute/2nd tone, which for me is not distinct from 00B4, only > used with sinograms in Mandarin Chinese, with its metrics distinct from > U+00B4 that match the Latin metrics). > > In my opinion 02BC is the best choice for the diacritic apostrophe. > > The other character for the **elision** apostrophe is a punctuation mark > U+2019 (just like the full stop punctuation is also used as an abbreviation > mark). There's no confusion with its alternate role as a right-side single > quote because U+2019 is used in languages that normally never use the > single quotes, but chevrons (or other punctuation signs in East-Asian > scripts). > > But in English where single quote are used for small quotations, there's > still a problem to represent this elision apostrophe when it does not occur > between two letters where it also marks a gluing of two morphemes (as in > "don't" or "Peter's"), but at the begining or end of a word. But elisions > at end of words is also invalid when this is the final word of a quoted > sentence. If you really want to cite a single English word terminated by an > elision apostrophe, the single quotes won't be usable and you'll use > chevrons like in this ‹demo’› and not single or double quotes which are > difficult to discriminate. > > > 2015-06-11 19:47 GMT+02:00 Bill Poser <[email protected]>: > >> To add a factor that I think hasn't been mentioned, there are languages >> in which apostrophe is used both as a letter by itself and as part of a >> complex letter. Most of the native languages of British Columbia write >> glottalized consonants as C+', e.g. <t'> for an ejective alveolar stop, and >> many use apostrophe by itself for the glottal stop. (Another common >> convention, which produces other difficulties, is to use the number <7> for >> glottal stop.) >> >> Bill >> >> On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 2:10 PM, Ted Clancy <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> On 4/Jun/2015 14:34 PM, Markus Scherer wrote: >>>> >>>> Looks all wrong to me. >>>> >>> Hi, Markus. I'm the guy who wrote the blog post. I'll respond to your >>> points below. >>> >>> >>> >>>> You can't use simple regular expressions to find word boundaries. >>>> That's why we have UAX #29. >>>> >>> >>> And UAX #29 doesn't work for words which begin or end with apostrophes, >>> whether represented by U+0027 or U+2019. It erroneously thinks there's a >>> word boundary between the apostrophe and the rest of the word. >>> >>> But UAX #29 *would* work if the apostrophes were represented by U+02BC, >>> which is what I'm suggesting. >>> >>> Confusion between apostrophe and quoting -- blame the scribe who came up >>>> with the ambiguous use, not the people who gave it a number. >>>> >>> I'm not trying to blame anyone. I'm trying to fix the problem. >>> >>> I know this problem has a long history. >>> >>> English is taught as that squiggle being punctuation, not a letter. >>>> >>> I think we need make a distinction between the colloquial usage of the >>> word "punctuation" and the Unicode general category "punctuation" which has >>> specific technical implications. >>> >>> I somewhat wish that Unicode had a separate category for "Things that >>> look like punctuation but behave like letters", which might clear up this >>> taxonomic confusion. (I would throw U+02BE (MODIFIER LETTER RIGHT HALF >>> RING) and U+02BF (MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING), neither of which are >>> actually modifiers, into that category too.) But we don't. And the English >>> apostrophe behaves like a letter, regardless of what your primary school >>> teacher might have told you, so with the options available in Unicode, it >>> needs to be classed as a letter. >>> >>> "don’t" is a contraction of two words, it is not one word. >>>> >>> This is utter nonsense. Should my spell-checker recognise "hasn't" as a >>> valid word? Or should it consider "hasn't" to be the word "hasn" followed >>> by the word "t", and then flag both of them as spelling errors? >>> >>> Is "fo'c'sle" the three separate words "fo", "c", and "sle"? >>> >>> The idea that words with apostrophes aren't valid words is a regrettable >>> myth that exists in English, which has repeatedly led to the apostrophe >>> being an afterthought in computing, leading to situations like this one. >>> >>> If anything, Unicode might have made a mistake in encoding two of these >>>> that look identical. How are normal users supposed to find both U+2019 >>>> and >>>> U+02BC on their keyboards, and how are they supposed to deal with >>>> incorrect >>>> usage? >>>> >>> Yeah, and there are fonts where I can't tell the difference between >>> capital I and lower-case l. But my spell-checker will underline a word >>> where I erroneously use an I instead of an l, and I imagine spell-checkers >>> of the future could underline a word where I erroneously use a closing >>> quote instead of an apostrophe, or vice versa. >>> >>> There are other possible solutions too, but I don't want to get into a >>> discussion about UI design. I'll leave that to UI designers. >>> >>> - Ted >>> >> >> >
