Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Scripsit Andy Dingley:
>> As to the difference between ' or ’, we had a long thread on
>> this fairly recently (few months), centred on the fact that "single
>> quote" and "apostrophe" are really not very clearly defined as
>> distinct in the available character sets, even Unicode.
>
> I don't know who these "we" are, but the references denote distinct
> characters without doubt, and the only confusion is around the
> unfortunate _names_. The _Unicode name_ of the Ascii apostrophe, ' (or
> '), is APOSTROPHE, but that's just a name, an identifier, and not
> descriptive of meaning (actually, it's misleading, but Unicode names
> will never be changed).
>
>> With much less consensus, the general outcome was that you can
>> reasonably use whichever you like, neither is ever "wrong" (except
>> that ‛ should be paired with ’, but not with ') and
>> that you'd quite reliably get a visually different glyph for each,
>> either straight or curly. Apart from that, there's no hard-and-fast
>> rule ' is only ever an "apostrophe" and never a "quote".
>
> Sorry, but that paragraph has far too much confusion to be analyzed.
>
> Here's the picture:
>
> The ASCII apostrophe ' works fairly universally in text, but it's almost
> never the _right_ character for anything, except in computer languages.
> Consider it as a poor man's excuse for a surrogate for a large
> collection of characters. Use it that way if you are lazy or have made
> an informed decision (a compromise), but don't you ever be proud of
> that.

IBTD. For example, in English it is customary (and AIUI expected) to use
the character that ’ represents should be used to delimit a quotation
within direct speech (which itself should be delimited by “ and
”. (I gathered that from reading several English books.)

I think you would agree that it would make especially English text with
quotations in direct speech (say, in a novel where one person tells another
what a third said) quite badly legible if somewhere there is an apostrophe
represented by ’ in the inner quotation, because you would have to
look very hard at the character and the context to see whether the inner
quotation ends or there is just an apostrophe in it. (BTDT, but YMMV if you
are a speaker of English as first language.)

Since apostrophes appear to occur quite often in English texts, I have
therefore decided that in my English texts, ' (the straight apostrophe,
' or ') is the appropriate character for all apostrophes as it
is clearly distinguishable from "the curly one" using the standard fonts
provided by common UIs. If you want to call that a compromise -- I call
it an informed design decision in support of usability (that should have
been made by the Unicode people instead if what you say below is correct).

To be proud about that is yet another thing. But what reasonable
alternative to the aforementioned approach would you suggest instead?

> For other characters, consult the applicable language and style guides
> (for _human_ languages).
>
> Note that ’ _should_ have a curly (curved) glyph but it's similar
> to a prime (yard symbol) in some fonts. It is explicitly recommended as
> punctuation apostrophe in the Unicode standard, and the standard also
> explicitly says that it is the same character as the right single
> quotation mark.

So it would seen that the standard recommends nonsense, or at least
something not universally applicable, here.


PointedEars
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