Notes on Afrikaans
Bibliography
Representing ’n
Afrikaans writes the indefinite article
’n, which is clearly an elision of
een. There are a priori multiple ways to
represent this using Unicode:
-
<U+0149 ʼn LATIN SMALL
LETTER N PRECEDED BY APOSTROPHE>. After all, this character is
specifically annoted “Afrikaans”. However, it is also
annoted “legacy compatibility character for ISO/IEC
6937”, and the corresponding character is deprecated (in that
standard, not in Unicode).
-
using the compatibility decomposition of U+0149, which is
<U+02BC ʼ MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE, U+006E n
LATIN SMALL LETTER N>. However, it seems that this decomposition is
a remnant of the time when U+02BC was the recommended character for
the representation of elision, which is no longer the case.
-
<U+2019 ’ RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, U+006E
n LATIN SMALL LETTER N>, on the basis of U+2019 being the
appropriate character for the apostrophe used for elision, and
on the basis of other similar constructs in Afrikaans. This is
the solution we have retained for the representation of the
UDHR.
Regardless of one’s choice, it seems that all three
representations, as well as the obvious <U+0027 '
APOSTROPHE, U+006E n LATIN SMALL LETTER N>, can be found on
the web without too much difficulty. It is also likely that one can
find <U+2018 ‘ LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, U+006E n
LATIN SMALL LETTER N>, as a result of “smart quotes”
functionality.
Note that the UCD provides the following complex uppercasing
and titlecasing for U+0149: <U+02BC ʼ MODIFIER LETTER
APOSTROPHE, U+004E N LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N>. However,
according to the Afrikaanse woordelys en spelreëels, when a
word starting with an apostrophe is capitalized, it is the first
letter of the next word which is capitalized; for example,
'n groot ... at the beginning of a sentence
becomes 'n Groot ... (rule 9.3; see more
examples at http://hapax.iquebec.com/typo-afrikaans.htm).