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Comment by kevin_thibedeau | Hacker News Reader

> What’s

Unicode has only one apostrophe. The same one as ASCII apostrophe. The problem here is people using right single qoute as a "fancy" apostrophe when they should be using a font that renders apostrophe in the desired way. I have to fix this junk all the time in CD-text and Musicbrainz metadata.

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The Unicode Standard states that U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is the preferred apostrophe character.

    0027 APOSTROPHE
    [snip]
    * 2019 is preferred for apostrophe

https://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NamesList.txt

Sadly, I don't think that pedantic people will accept Unicode's notes, the same way that they will stil use the Ohm symbol (which is just there for CJK compatibilty) even if Unicode explicitly stated that the correct approach is to use the capital omega symbol.

(Or even the dreaded case of using the Philippine Peso sign (which is simply named in Unicode as the PESO SIGN) for other pesos, which is sometimes encountered in some apps! At least this is outright wrong that it is corrected immediately.)

First: no, that reasoning doesn't generalize nearly well enough. Unicode has many quotation marks, and " is just one of them. “ and ” are perfectly acceptable to use to wrap double-quoted text and you can't say they "should" use ordinary " and a proper font, because a font doesn't know which one is the beginning and which is the end of the quoted text. (Hence why those characters even exist).

Second: no, Unicode definitely considers other characters to be apostrophes:

    >>> unicodedata.name(chr(700)) # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modifier_letter_apostrophe
    'MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE'
    >>> unicodedata.name(chr(1370)) # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_(Unicode_block)
    'ARMENIAN APOSTROPHE'
    >>> unicodedata.name(chr(2036)) # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%27Ko_script
    'NKO HIGH TONE APOSTROPHE'
    >>> unicodedata.name(chr(2037))
    'NKO LOW TONE APOSTROPHE'
    >>> unicodedata.name(chr(65287)) # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfwidth_and_fullwidth_forms
    'FULLWIDTH APOSTROPHE'
    >>> unicodedata.name(chr(917543)) # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags_(Unicode_block)
    'TAG APOSTROPHE'

There's even a "double apostrophe" which is definitely not any kind of quotation mark, semantically (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modifier_letter_double_apostro...) .

For that matter, there's a "Greek question mark" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark#Greek_question_m...) which is semantically equivalent to ? for Greek text, but rendered identically to ; in most fonts. And there are some CJK ideographs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_characters) which represent completely fake characters not used in any writing (including in any other East Asian language), which were included in an old Japanese character standard by mistake and then copied into Unicode.

"Unicode only has one" is the start of a lot of false claims. It is very much "designed by committee".

First: you don't need to generalize it, it's true in this specific case, and this fact doesn't depend on the ability to generalize

Second: no, there is only a single apostrophe fit for this context, the ones are used for different purposes

We can follow and make all sorts of rules. What you cannot do:

- Unicode has only one apostrophe (the ASCII one literally named that)

When Unicode says

- 2019 is preferred for apostrophe

You can’t appeal to Unicode and then ignore them in the next breath.

You should take this argument back to the OP or zahlman re. whether referencing Unicode implies agreement with any nonsense in the standard's comments (such as rejecting the literal "apostrophe" to be used as an apostrophe).

I was responding to the list of symbols named "apostrophe", where zahlman also seems to follow the consistent logic of only listing apostrophes, not quotes

> You should take this argument back to the OP or zahlman re. whether referencing Unicode implies agreement with any nonsense in the standard's comments (such as rejecting the literal "apostrophe" to be used as an apostrophe).

You: No, that’s completely true what they said there

You: Wait, you should take that up with them…

Just don’t speak out of your mouth with “Unicode” when you aren’t prepared to get it thrown back in your face? Doesn’t seem difficult.

> I was responding to the list of symbols named "apostrophe", where zahlman also seems to follow the consistent logic of only listing apostrophes, not quotes

Oh wow they’re named apostrophe? How great. I’ll start using this “start of header” character in my emails, that is probably so fit for purpose.

But what does seem difficult is for you to use words for understanding instead of throwing throwing them in people's faces.

It is true what they said within the context of the conversation where the standard notes are either explicitly or implicitly rejected.

> that is probably so fit for purpose.

Or probably not. Unlike in this case where apostrophe is definitely fit for purpose

I don’t know why I phrased that so aggressively. Sorry.

> Unicode has only one apostrophe. The same one as ASCII apostrophe. The problem here is people using right single qoute as a "fancy" apostrophe when they should be using a font that renders apostrophe in the desired way.

No, the ASCII ‘quotes’ are inch and foot markers. Relying on a font to render the the inch and foot markers as quotes is a … unique … approach.

> I have to fix this junk all the time in CD-text and Musicbrainz metadata.

Wait, are you the guy whose Musicbrainz titles are constantly replacing my carefully- and properly-punctuated ones every time I sync? I beg you to reconsider.

> the ASCII ‘quotes’ are inch and foot markers.

There are special symbols for those. There is no other symbol for the apostrophe

> Relying on a font to render the the inch and foot markers as quotes is a … unique … approach

No, you would rely on a font to render those dedicated inch symbols as inch markers

Besides you can only do the display substitution with context awareness, so that ' as inches won't be changed to quotes, but ' in titles will be

What input method are you using such that this is even possible? Nearly all English speakers are using keyboards with a single apostrophe key which inserts \x27, and could not insert any of the other quote characters even if they wanted to. As a result, nearly all extant English-language text uses \x27 for both apostrophes and single quotes, and all this Unicode prescriptivism is describing a convention that is clearly not the one that English actually follows.

> What input method are you using such that this is even possible?

ibus. In my X settings the physical Caps Lock key is turned into Compose, and then I can easily type ‘ with Compose <' (and vice-versa), ’ with Compose >' (ditto), “ with Compose <" (ditto), ” with Compose >" (ditto), ß with Compose ss, þ with Compose th, Þ with Compose TH, æ with Compose ae, Æ with Compose AE, … with Compose .., — with Compose ---, – with Compose --. and so forth.

https://github.com/kragen/xcompose offers an excellent XCompose file with over a thousand wonderful Compose mappings. Highly recommended!

> Unicode has only one apostrophe.

Two code points have "apostrophe" in their name, U+0027 and U+02BC:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Unicode

There is also a third which is often used, U+2019:

> The Unicode character ’ (U+2019 right single quotation mark) is used for both a typographic apostrophe and a single right (closing) quotation mark.[1] This is due to the many fonts and character sets (such as CP1252) that unified the characters into a single code point, and the difficulty of software distinguishing which character is intended by a user's typing.[2] There are arguments that the typographic apostrophe should be a different code point, U+02BC modifier letter apostrophe.[3][better source needed]

> The straight apostrophe ' (the "ASCII apostrophe", U+0027 ' apostrophe) is even more ambiguous, as it could also be intended as a left or right quotation mark, or a prime symbol.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_single_quotation_mark

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