On Wed, 4 Jan 2017 13:43:50 +0100 Philippe Verdy <[email protected]> wrote:
> Note that in French the right single quote is normally not used at > all as a quotation mark, and when it appears between two letters it > is unambiguously an apostrophe. I think the letter apostrophe was > addede later in Unicode only for English to allow distrinctions. But > I've rarely seen used. Later it was used as a substitute for a > glottal stop in some Polynesian/Melanesian languages but the actual > character was encoded and is preferable (its glyph is distinctive). As consonants, what we have are spacing clones (U+02BC and U+02BE) of the smooth breathing, usually used for glottal stops, and spacing clones of the rough breathing (U+02BD and U+02BF). We also have the modifier modifications of the IPA letters U+02C0 and U+02C1. These usages only fit English well when representing the glottalisation (or even total loss) of /t/ after vowels. > 2017-01-04 12:44 GMT+01:00 John W Kennedy <[email protected]>: > > > No it isn’t. It isn’t an apostrophe; it’s a left single quote, > > although some modern printers mistakenly suppose it to be an > > apostrophe, and substitute one. And it isn’t an elision; it’s meant > > as a substitute glyph for a superscript c. For which I would suggest U+02BF MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING would be the best modern representative of the substitute character! Of course, that would further increase confusion of those who initially read U+02BF as a superscript 'c', and only later, if ever, realise that it's actually a rough breathing carefully distinguished from the similar punctuation marks. Richard.
