From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Feb 03 2007 - 19:28:15 CST
From: "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
>> it should be used when an apostrophe is called for; not U+2019
>
> No, the Unicode standard clearly says that U+2019 is preferred as
> punctuation apostrophe. The character U+0027 should have a neutral
> (vertical) glyph, and usually has, though in some fonts it's slighly
> slanted.
But why then all French spelling autocorrectors are changing the weak ASCII vertical quote into a curly apostrophe? This is correct in French, simply because U+2019 is not used as a normal French punctuation (we only use high curly double quotes (turned 180 degrees, but not mirrored), and chevrons guillemots for quotation marks, so U+2019 is unambiguously a linguistic and orthographic apostrophe)
i did not thought about the U+02BC modifier letter, but it is also an alternative encoding with similar rendering, but it looks quite bad because of its decomposition properties, and its glyph is the same as the acute accent which is straight and too much horizontal.
So I'd say that U+2019 is also a neutral glyph, like U+0027 is, the difference being in its prefered slanted or 9-shaped or comma-shaped glyph instead of a vertical glyph.
The character properties are not bad: they are accurate in Unicode only in language-neutral contexts, but these properties are not suited to be usable in actual languages; if you know the language, then the character classification (letter or quotation mark, opening/closing) changes according to language rules.
Note also that French has some usage of the other curly single quote also as a letter (for transcribing some languages, notably the Arabic aleph) ; it is much more common like this than using the unknown glyph (sort of superscript undotted question mark) described for the glottal stop.
Look at some normative names in French for some language names or in toponyms: the curly quotes are really used for the French apostrophe and the glottal stop, and the distinction between the two is absolutely necessary (something that the ASCii quote does not permit).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Feb 03 2007 - 19:30:44 CST