Excessive digrams based on (non-combining) apostrophes will create numerous problems. The only case I know that uses an apostrophe in a polygram is the trigram "c'h" used in Breton, where it is used to differentiate it from "ch" (but here also it would have been simpler to use another digraph, such as "sh", or a diacritic but Bretons wanted to use the diacritics available in Frencdh which has no diacritic on consonants except "ç" with the cedilla which could have been used there, and the tilde in "ñ"). The "c'h" trigram in Breton however causes less problems because it is not final and within a pair where it is unlikely to mark an elision between two words.
But now Kazakh will have difficulties to mark elisions, and will also have problem to allow distinctive quotations I hope they will never have cases like: 's'a'n'd'' with pairs of apostrophes at end and it would have been better readable to see: 'ŝäñď'. Using the caron diacritic, typical in Eastern European languages, would have also done the trick over consonnants, while preserving the possibility to capitalize letters: a single diacritic was easy to map on keyboards. Adding the diaeresis or macron, or even the acute for the long vowels would have also done the trick with the second diacritic. But here Kazakh has some turkic origin and solutions based on other turkic alphabets could have been used. But may be they did not like the compelxity of Turkish for dotless vs. dotted "i". But a few diacritics could have helped without having to use custom ligatures or digrams. Now I think that these proposed non-combining apostrophes will evolve to combining acute accents (the most widely used diacritic in Latin in most languages): it will make the texts actually more readable. 2018-01-16 9:10 GMT+01:00 Shriramana Sharma via Unicode <[email protected] >: > Rejecting the digraph method (which is probably the simplest) doesn't have > much meaning because they have different sounds in different languages all > the time like ch in English and German. >
