[Biblical-languages] Apostrophe / Coronis

Giuseppe Regalzi regalzi at infinito.it
Sat May 3 13:53:44 EDT 2003


Peter Kirk wrote:

> OK, not the Coronis then... but which apostrophe? I notice you use 0027
> on your website, and it is called APOSTROPHE in the Unicode standard,
> but in that document the "preferred character for apostrophe" is 2019.
> So which apostrophe is an apostrophe is an apostrophe?


Quoting from the always enlightening Yannis Haralambous ("Guidelines and
Suggested Amendments to the Greek Unicode Tables," in Proceedings of the
International Unicode Conference 21, Dublin 2002,
http://omega.enstb.org/yannis/pdf/amendments2.pdf):


Guidelines, Rule 7: Apostrophe vs. Smooth Breathing

rule: Use U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK rather than U+1FBF GREEK
PSILI as an apostrophe.

rationale: the reader may ask "why on earth would anyone use U+1FBF GREEK
PSILI as an apostrophe in the first place?" Well, the fact is that the
shape of the apostrophe in Greek typography is exactly the one of the
smooth breathing U+1FBF GREEK PSILI. The "Latin" apostrophe U+2019 RIGHT
SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is a bit longer, and looks more like a comma than
like a smooth breathing. This difference seems small, but is quite
unpleasant when you have both an apostrophe and a smooth breathing close
to each other, and this happens quite often in Greek. Therefore one could
be tempted to use U+1FBF GREEK PSILI (which after all, is a spacing
diacritic) as an apostrophe. (See also fig. 4.)
This would be against Unicode principles: in fact, it is the rendering
engine which should change the shape of the apostrophe in a Greek context.
En passant, note that Greek is the only language in the world where a
blank space is systematically inserted after an apostrophe.


Hope this helps,
Giuseppe Regalzi

regalzi at tiscali.it
http://purl.org/net/regalzi/



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