Re: (Mis?)using quote as apostrophe

[Dmitry Alexandrov]

Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 27 May 2020 at 13:05, Dmitry Alexandrov <dag@gnui.org> wrote:
>> Heh.  Iʼm afraid, itʼs not merely unfortunate, itʼs totally in spite of the 
>> whole spirit of Unicode, and simply silly.  Just as if it said that ” (RIGHT 
>> DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK) were the preferred character for inches sign.
>
> FWIW, the preferred character for inches is U+2033 DOUBLE PRIME. (Not U+0022 
> as some say.)

Yep.  Thatʼs one of the objectives of Unicode: to split symbols, that were 
conflated once due to the space shortage, _semantically_, no matter how similar 
they look.  So overloading the right single quote with apostrophe (as itʼs used 
in English or, say, Bielorussian) is absolutely inapt.

>> A!  _Punctuation_ apostrophe.  Whatever is it, itʼs not what we are taking 
>> about here.  hunspell does not check punctuation.
>
> Also FWIW, many English grammar guides out there call the apostrophe a 
> punctuation mark, whether it indicates possession or contraction.

Perfectly plausible¹, yet it does not change the fact that compilers of English 
dictionaries for hunspell clearly consider apostrophe as a part of a word.

-
¹ Grammarians do not seem to be very much concerned of the reality.  For 
instance, you are perhaps aware, that nearly any book from primers onwards 
positively state that a grapheme ‘ё’ is an integral part of Russian alphabet, 
thatʼs while ‘е́’ is not, despite that in any practical application (lexical 
sorting, searching, etc) they should be treated exactly the same.

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