Re: Apostrophe (was: Re: Security Issues:  Navajo)

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Mar 28 2005 - 15:00:47 CST

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    Sorry, I had not checked this. I thought it was a true apostrophe letter,
    not the single quotation mark.

    Well, I don't like using quotation marks at all if I want to make a true
    apostrophe. The ASCII single quote is certainly better encoding for that
    purpose, and I will only use these quotation marks characters when they are
    effectively opening/closing punctuations and not apostrophes...

    On the opposite, I see no opposition to use U+2032 (PRIME) as an apostrophe,
    as its intent is to be acting like a modifier letter, whose meaning is
    attached to another preceding letter to change its interpreted semantic, and
    this PRIME character is not really a punctuation.

    (Note that the DOUBLE PRIME U+2033 was propably not necessary, because its
    common mathematical interpretation means the same as two successive PRIME
    characters, and also maths would need then TRIPLE PRIME, QUADRUPLE PRIME,
    and so on... which are not encoded and must be encoded anyway with as many
    PRIME characters as needed; I see the PRIME character in match like a
    function name, and it acts as a separate symbolic letter, with the same role
    as modifier letters in written languages).

    So the name "GUILLEMET-APOSTROPHE" for U+2019 seems quite misleading, as
    probably any text will be never composed like this when a apostrophe letter
    is needed.

    You will convince users to use something else than the ASCII quote when
    entering a linguistic apostrophe only when there will be a dedicated
    character in Unicode/ISO/IEC 10646 which does not mix the use of these
    characters, and whose interpretation will never be ambiguous (offering
    better alternatives for languages that need the apostrophe as part of their
    alphabet).

    So better encode a APOSTROPHE LETTER, before speaking about replacing all
    ambiguous ASCII quotes... (Or may be specify that U+00B4, the *spacing*
    accute accent, is a modifier letter that already has the necessary
    interpretation; same thing with U+02DD, the spacing double accute accent
    which could become a modifier letter as well).

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net>
    To: "Unicode Mailing List" <unicode@unicode.org>
    Cc: <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr>; "Patrick Andries" <patrick.andries@xcential.com>;
    "Tom Gewecke" <tom@bluesky.org>
    Sent: Monday, March 28, 2005 8:48 AM
    Subject: Apostrophe (was: Re: Security Issues: Navajo)

    > Philippe VERDY <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:
    >
    >> Why isn't there any apostrophe [U+2019] in ISO-8859-1, or in
    >> Windows1252, or in the revized ISO-8859-15?
    >
    > U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, the character we are talking about,
    > is in Windows CP1252, at position 0x92.



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