Re: FW: New version of TR29:

From: John D. Burger (john@mitre.org)
Date: Tue Aug 20 2002 - 14:32:53 EDT


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



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