From: William J Poser (wjposer@ldc.upenn.edu)
Date: Thu May 10 2007 - 14:36:26 CDT
A nice example of the problems created by using apostrophe
for glottal stop (and glottalization of the preceding consonant)
is found in Carrier. This convention was introduced in the days
of typewriters, when apostrophe and right single quote were the same.
MS Word and other word processors, however, are prone to think that
the Carrier glottal stop/glottalization marker is an abstract
single quote and to translate the user's input into a right single
quote or even worse, if it is odd-numbered, a left single quote.
This results in some very peculiar-looking text, where word-initial
glottal stop (which for grammatical reasons is very common in Carrier)
looks like the beginning of a quotation.
Chris Harvey is right to point out that people originally had in
mind something that looked just like an apostrophe and therefore
may not be happy with the use of U+02BC. Carrier people identify
the apostrophe and the glottalization marker to the extent that
many of them use "glottal" as the name for "apostrophe". They
will spell out a word like "dog's" as "dee-oh-gee-glottal-ess".
On the other hand, given the range of realizations of "apostrophe"
already found, which now includes left single quote, I suspect that
in many cases they will be perfectly happy with it since the
appearance of the glottal stop/glottalization marker will become
less variable.
Bill
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