In publishing critical editions of ancient/medieval Greek texts, I regularly 
deals with editions that mix elision and closing single-quotation marks. That 
is, I cannot assume without context that an instance of U+2019 represents 
either an ancient/medieval elision mark or modern editorial punctuation. I 
therefore have no expectations on ideal behavior when double-clicking a string 
with U+2019.


Best wishes,


jk

--
Joel Kalvesmaki
Editor in Byzantine Studies
Dumbarton Oaks
1703 32nd St. NW
Washington, DC 20007
(202) 339-6435
________________________________
From: Unicode <unicode-boun...@unicode.org> on behalf of Mark Davis ☕️ via 
Unicode <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2019 3:37:54 AM
To: James Tauber
Cc: Richard Wordingham; Unicode Mailing List
Subject: Re: Ancient Greek apostrophe marking elision

It would certainly be possible (and relatively simple) to change ’ into a word 
character for languages that don't use ’ for any other purpose. And if no 
languages using a particular script use ’ for another purpose, then it is 
particularly easy. (If you depend on language tagging, then any software that 
doesn't maintain the language tagging will cause it to revert to the default 
behavior.)

So does modern Greek use ’ for in trailing environments where people wouldn't 
expect it to be included in word selection?

Mark


On Mon, Jan 28, 2019 at 8:49 AM James Tauber 
<jtau...@jtauber.com<mailto:jtau...@jtauber.com>> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 28, 2019 at 2:31 AM Mark Davis ☕️ 
<m...@macchiato.com<mailto:m...@macchiato.com>> wrote:
But the question is how important those are in daily life. I'm not sure why the 
double-click selection behavior is so much more of a problem for Ancient Greek 
users than it is for the somewhat larger community of English users. Word 
selection is not normally as important an operation as line break, which does 
work as expected.

Even if they don't _really_ care about word selection, there are digital 
classicists who care even less about U+2019 being the preferred character which 
makes it harder for me to make my case :-)

What triggered the question in my original post about tailoring the Word 
Boundary Rules was the statement in TR29 "A further complication is the use of 
the same character as an apostrophe and as a quotation mark. Therefore leading 
or trailing apostrophes are best excluded from the default definition of a 
word." Because Ancient Greek does not have that ambiguity, there's no need for 
the exclusion in that case. Immediately following that quote is a suggestion 
about tailoring for French and Italian which made we wonder if the "right" 
thing to do is to tailor the WBRs for Ancient Greek.

I know you've said here (and in your original response to me) that you don't 
think it's worth it, but is WBR tailoring (the only|the best|a) technically 
correct way to achieve with U+2019 (in Ancient Greek) what people are abusing 
U+02BC for?

James

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