I should qualify my statement. The Zwicky and Pullum article was a nice piece 
of linguistic analysis regarding the morphological characteristics of “n’t”. 
Their remark about apostrophe, however, was not so much about orthography — 
which was not the focus of their article — but was rather a way of putting an 
exclamation on their findings.

When it comes to orthography, the notion of what comprise words of a language 
is generally pure convention. That’s because there isn’t any single 
_linguistic_ definition of word that gives the same answer when phonological 
vs. morphological or syntactic criteria are applied. There are book-length 
works on just this topic, such as this:

Di Sciullo, Anna Maria, and Edwin Williams. 1987. On the definition of word. 
(Linguistic Inquiry monograph fourteen.) Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: The MIT 
Press.


Peter

From: ver...@gmail.com [mailto:ver...@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Philippe Verdy
Sent: Saturday, June 13, 2015 12:03 AM
To: Peter Constable
Cc: Kalvesmaki, Joel; Unicode Mailing List
Subject: Re: Another take on the English apostrophe in Unicode

I disagree: U+02BC already qualifies as a letter (even if it is not specific to 
the Latin script and is not dual-cased). It is perfectly integrable in 
language-specific alphabets and we don't need another character to encode it 
once again as a letter.

So the only question is about choosing between:
- on one side, U+02BC (the existing apostrophe letter), and other possible 
candidate letters for alternate forms (including U+02C8 for the vertical form, 
and the common fallback letter U+00B4 present in many legacy fonts for systems 
built before the UCS was standardized and using legacy 8-bit charsets such as 
ISO 8859-1).
- and on the other side, U+2019 where it is encoded as a quotation punctuation 
mark (like also the legacy ASCII single quote)

Note that U+00B4 (from ISO 8859-1) has also been used in association with 
U+0074 (from ASCII) to replace the more ambiguous ASCII quote U+0027 by 
assigning an orientation: the exact shape of these two is variable, between a 
thin rectangle, or a wedge, or a curly comma (shaped like 6 and 9 digits), as 
well as the exact angle when it is a wedge or thin rectangle (these characters 
however have been used since long in overstriking mode to add accents over 
Latin capital letters, so the curly comma shapes are very uncommon and they are 
more horizontal than vertical and U+00B4 will be a very poor cantidate for the 
apostrophe that should have a narrow advance width.

So there remains in practice U+02BC and U+02C8 for this apostrophe letter 
(which one you'll use is a matter of preference but U+02C8  will not be used if 
there are two distinct apostrophes in the language (e.g. in Polynesian 
languages where the distinction was made even more clearer by using right or 
left rings U+02BE/U+02BF, or glottal letters U+02C0/U+02C1 if that letter has a 
very distinctive phonetic realisation as a plain consonnant with two variants 
like in Arabic or even U+02B0 when this is just a breath without stop: the full 
range range U+02B0-U+02C1 offers much enough variations for this letter if you 
need slight phonetic distinctions).

2015-06-13 8:28 GMT+02:00 Peter Constable 
<peter...@microsoft.com<mailto:peter...@microsoft.com>>:
Nice article, as I recall. (Been a long time.)


Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: Unicode 
[mailto:unicode-boun...@unicode.org<mailto:unicode-boun...@unicode.org>] On 
Behalf Of Kalvesmaki, Joel
Sent: Friday, June 5, 2015 7:27 AM
To: Unicode Mailing List
Subject: Re: Another take on the English apostrophe in Unicode

I don't have a particular position staked out. But to this discussion should be 
added the very interesting work done by Zwicky and Pullum arguing that the 
apostrophe is the 27th letter of the Latin alphabet. Neither U+2019 nor U+02BC 
would satisfy that position. See:

Zwicky and Pullum 1983 Zwicky, Arnold M., and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 
"Cliticization vs. Inflection: English N'T."Language59, no. 3 (1983): 502-513.

It's nicely summarized and discussed here:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/03/22/being-an-apostrophe/

jk
--
Joel Kalvesmaki
Editor in Byzantine Studies
Dumbarton Oaks
202 339 6435


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