Re: Ancient Greek apostrophe marking elision

[Asmus Freytag via Unicode]

On 1/25/2019 9:39 AM, James Tauber via Unicode wrote: Thank you, although the word break does still affect things like double-clicking to select. And people do seem to want to use U+02BC for this reason (and I'm trying to articulate why that isn't what U+02BC is meant for). For normal edition operations, breaking selection for "d'Artagnan" or "can't" into two is overly fussy. No wonder people get frustrated. A./ James On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 12:34 PM Mark Davis ☕️ <m...@macchiato.com> wrote: U+2019 is normally the character used, except where the ’ is considered a letter. When it is between letters it doesn't cause a word break, but because it is also a right single quote, at the end of words there is a break. Thus in a phrase like «tryin’ to go» there is a word break after the n, because one can't tell. So something like "δ’ αρχαια" (picking a phrase at random) would have a word break after the delta.  Word break:  δ’ αρχαια  However, there is no line break between them (which is the more important operation in normal usage). Probably not worth tailoring the word break. Line break: δ’ αρχαια  Mark On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 1:10 PM James Tauber via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote: There seems some debate amongst digital classicists in whether to use U+2019 or U+02BC to represent the apostrophe in Ancient Greek when marking elision. (e.g. δ’ for δέ preceding a word starting with a vowel). It seems to me that U+2019 is the technically correct choice per the Unicode Standard but it is not without at least one problem: default word breaking rules. I'm trying to provide guidelines for digital classicists in this regard. Is it correct to say the following: 1) U+2019 is the correct character to use for the apostrophe in Ancient Greek when marking elision.  2) U+02BC is a misuse of a modifier for this purpose 3) However, use of U+2019 (unlike U+02BC) means the default Word Boundary Rules in UAX#29 will (incorrectly) exclude the apostrophe from the word token 4) And use of U+02BC (unlike U+2019) means Glyph Cluster Boundary Rules in UAX#29 will (incorrectly) include the apostrophe as part of a glyph cluster with the previous letter 5) The correct solution is to tailor the Word Boundary Rules in the case of Ancient Greek to treat U+2019 as not breaking a word (which shouldn't have the same ambiguity problems with the single quotation mark as in English as it should not be used as a quotation mark in Ancient Greek) Many thanks in advance. James -- James Tauber Greek Linguistics: https://jktauber.com/ Music Theory: https://modelling-music.com/ Digital Tolkien: https://digitaltolkien.com/ Twitter: @jtauber