From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Mon May 22 2006 - 09:38:32 CDT
On Mon, 22 May 2006, Otto Stolz wrote:
> Jukka K. Korpela schrieb:
>> I don't think traditional or modern typography ever distinguises between a
>> punctuation apostrophe and a right single quotation mark
>
> This is only in a particular language, viz. English.
>
> In German, e. g., traditional typography indeed draws this
> distinction: the single quotation marks are U+201A and U+2018,
> whilst the apostrophe is U+2019.
That's a different issue. The quotation marks (both double and single)
used in German differ from those in English. The issue is somewhat
obfuscated by Unicode names like "right single quotation mark", which
reflect English usage. In German usage (assuming correct usage), "right
single quotation mark", i.e. U+2019, is unambiguously used as an
apostrophe only. This does not mean making the distinction that I
mentioned, namely distinguishing between two similar-looking characters
(that look like a raised comma) by meaning and usage.
> I have found the same distinction
> made in a book on Polish typography, and I have seen it applied
> in Czech books.
I'm not familar with Polish or Czech orthography, and it is sometimes
rather difficult to find reliable information on rules for single (inner)
quotation marks, since they are relatively rare characters. Unfortunately,
the CLDR data on them is still in error, apparently with normal and
alternate (inner) quotation marks mostly interchanged:
http://www.unicode.org/cldr/data/diff/by_type/delimiters.html
But if I guess correctly, Czech uses the same quotation marks as German,
whereas Polish uses the same marks as US English. So do you really mean
that Polish typography distinguishes between an apostrophe and a closing
quotation mark that has the same general shape as the apostrophe?
-- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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