Andrew C. West <andrewcwest at alumni dot princeton dot edu> wrote: > Does not work with K'ang-hsi or Ch'ien-lung, or apostrophes used in > IPA and other systems of phonetic transcription. > > Seems to me that one apostrophe is not enough - how about a NON- > BREAKING APOSTROPHE for cases like K'ang-hsi or Ch'ien-lung, and by > default the ordinary apostrophe is always breaking ?
IPA does use U+02C8 MODIFIER LETTER VERTICAL LINE where you only *think* you are seeing an apostrophe. However, for Wade-Giles transcriptions of Chinese (like K'ang-hsi and Ch'ien-lung) and for most other applications of the apostrophe, the only way you could introduce a NON-BREAKING APOSTROPHE would be if you were completely unconcerned about converting legacy data. U+0027 is currently used in a variety of contexts; there's no getting around that. As enticing as it sounds, disunifying it would not solve the problem; it would simply move it from the text boundaries category to the legacy data conversion category. See the section of the WG2 "Principles and Procedures" document (URL on request) regarding the DECIMAL SEPARATOR character proposed in 1991. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
