Rock ’n’ Roll: correct apostrophe usage

[Richard L]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

All, what is correct apostrophe usage when abreviating "and" to ’n’? (for US grammar)
I've seen all kinds of versions out there.

[eliason]

You have it right: the apostrophe takes the place of both missing letters a and d, just as it does in words like "I'll" and "can't."

Not-that-smart "smart" quotation features assume that a typed apostrophe beginning a word is intended to be an open single quote, but they are wrong in cases like '68 Olympics, 'Tis the season, and rock 'n' roll.

[Nick Shinn]

Isn’t it about time the poor apostrophe had its own Unicode?

[hrant]

But is such use of two apostrophes grammatically correct to begin with? If it's not, "anything goes" works out fine anyway.

http://www.in-n-out.com/

BTW auto-quotes also mess up the Hawai‘ian ‘okina diacritic.

Nick, the apostrophe does have its own Unicode number; but I'm not sure how much it's actually referenced.

hhp

[agisaak]

Hrant,

If you're thinking of U02BC, that's only appropriate where the apostophe serves either as a phonetic modifier or as a letter in its own right, so this would be appropriate for words like b'ak'tun or Qur'an, but not for words like 'n'.

André

[altsan]

Strictly speaking, I believe U+0027 is the apostrophe. It's only typists' convention (and the limitations of ASCII) which causes most word processors to use it as a synonym for the right single quote.

I see the Unicode standard describes U+2019/right single quote as also being the 'preferred' apostrophe character (goodness knows why), but it doesn't change that U+0027 is the character officially assigned as the apostrophe...

[hrant]

André, I didn't know that! Thank you.

Alex, I think 0027 is best seen as a non-directional single quote.

hhp

[John Hudson]

U+0027 is a deliberately ambiguous character intended to represent a left quote, a right quote and an apostrophe. It reflects the fact that computer keyboards typically follow typewriter keyboards -- as opposed to, say, typesetter keyboards --, and these had only one ' key. I don't consider U+0027 to be a character at all in the sense of something to be displayed as a text entity; I consider it a (not very good) input mechanism for other characters.

Nick: Isn’t it about time the poor apostrophe had its own Unicode?

It already has two. U+2019 is the right quote character that, following writing practice, is normally indistinguishable from the apostrophe, hence Unicode's annotation that this is the preferred apostrophe character on the grounds that, unlike U+0027, it actually looks like an apostrophe. The other apostrophe character is U+02BC, but as André notes this is properly used only in some forms of transcription where it typically indicates a glottal stop.

Is there a need for an apostrophe character distinct from the right quote character? I don't think so: written and typographic practice is for these two characters to be identical, and I can't think of any behaviour distinctions. The problem is not lack of a separate codepoint for apostrophe, but the general shittiness of keyboard layouts derived from typewriters and the inability of 'smart' quote substitution to handle all the instances in which the input mechanism U+0027 needs to be displayed as U+2019.

[hrant]

Actually it would be nice to have a proper apostrophe code point, simply because an apostrophe is not a quote! They have a different meaning. Just because writers and typographers have been too lazy to show a difference doesn't mean they never will. Remember, some people like quotes to point in a different direction than an apostrophe (not to mention the size potentially being different). I personally believe the ideal closing quotes point upward (and inward) and have in fact made a font like that (Cristaal). Nobody has to do that, but not having an apostrophe code point obstructs that choice.

hhp

[timd]

 

We don’t need no apostrophes.

Tim

[John Hudson]

Bob D'ylan might not need apostrophes but greengrocer's do.

[John Hudson]

Hrant: Actually it would be nice to have a proper apostrophe code point, simply because an apostrophe is not a quote! They have a different meaning.

Unicode does not encode semantics, it encodes text entities. This $ has a different meaning in various countries, despite often having the same name, but is a single character.

Your Cristaal example would be evidence for possible disunification, but idiosyncracy tends not to be very convincing in what is, after all, systems built on conventions and standardisation. You'd need to present a variety of examples in real-world use and make the case this these merit requiring updates of all software to handle the new apostrophe character.

[hrant]

John, is producing examples of precedents the only way to achieve disunification? What about if I could robustly explain the future benefits?

hhp

[quadibloc]

Unicode does not encode glyphs, and so each Unicode point actually does represent a "meaning". So f, f, and i can become the ffi ligature, Arabic letters appear only once, and so on.

In ASCII, U+0027 is supposed to be the apostrophe and closing quote, and U+0060 is supposed to be the opening quote. In practice, though, U+0027 was available before U+0060, since that character was only added when lower-case was added to ASCII, so the practice of using U+0027 like the symmetrical symbol on a typewriter was well established.

So there ought to be a different Unicode codepoint for the cases where one actually wants the typewriter-style symbol!

On the other hand, U+0022 is officially a typewriter-like ambiguous double quote. So single and double quotes are handled very differently in the basic 256-character set. On the other hand, guillemets are handled properly in Unicode.

This is a mess, and the response has been for each operating system and application to handle U+0027 in whatever way fits its own needs. Since the "right" Unicode character is usually one that our keyboards won't let us type, I don't know if this can be "fixed" in a way that won't just make things worse.

[John Hudson]

...each Unicode point actually does represent a "meaning"

No. Meaning is semantic content of language. Writing systems capture various aspects of language as text, but outside of the Chinese ideographic system semantics are generally the least commonly captured aspect of language (English orthography only captures semantics via some punctuation, notably in the distinction between its and it's, i.e. a distinction of meaning that is phonetically absent).

Unicode encodes text entities for plain text processing, which means, as you note, that it does not usually encode glyph variants (ironically, the two examples you give of ffi ligature and Arabic positional forms are exceptions, since these have encoded presentation forms for backwards compatibility). But not encoding glyph variants does not mean that what Unicode encodes is meaning. Even in the case of East Asian ideographs, what Unicode encodes are the text entities needed for plain text processing, not the meaning of the characters (obviously, since some characters have multiple meanings or have diverged in their meaning in different cultures).

In ASCII, U+0027 is supposed to be the apostrophe and closing quote, and U+0060 is supposed to be the opening quote.

U+0060 is a spacing grave accent, and is clearly identified as such in the Unicode Standard. It is not an opening quote and is not intended to be used as such. [BTW, there is no such thing as an 'opening quote' character outside of the conventions of particular punctuation systems. The 'left quote' character is a closing quote in the German system.]

[John Hudson]

Hrant: John, is producing examples of precedents the only way to achieve disunification? What about if I could robustly explain the future benefits?

Providing examples of existing use is by far the easiest means to get any character encoded in Unicode. In the case of disunifications, the bar is higher than for new characters, because stability is one of the principle goals of any technical standard. In the case of Unicode, stability can also be a strict requirement due to signed agreements with other standards organisations that rely on Unicode not changing certain things. So, for example, Unicode has agreed with the IETF not to introduce any more characters with canonical decompositions. Some disunifications are likely to be subject to such agreements.

Really, I think your idea is likely a non-starter, because you're talking about disunifying characters that have been part of ASCII or ANSI for a heck of a long time. This is the sort of stuff that software developers consider core library stuff that no one has had to think about for decades. With regard to 'future benefits', pushback is much more likely to focus on future disruptions.

[hrant]

Sadly I have to agree that it's pretty hopeless.

What about co-opting an existing seldom-used apostrophe-like code point? Like U02BC.

Or even adding a new one: "Apostrophe We Never Knew We Really Needed". :-)
(And just for the memories: https://typography.guru/forums/topic/79010-forwarding)

hhp

[John Hudson]

Well, yes, you could take the uppercase eszett approach, and encode a new character without changing any official behaviour for existing characters. The argument in that case is along the lines of 'Some people want to be able to distinguish an apostrophe from a right quote, so without changing the existing dual identity of U+2019, we'd like to encode a distinct apostrophe character'.

And I'm 99.9% certain that the response in that case would be 'Such people should use U+02BC'.

[oldnick]

Jeez: talk about a tempest in a teapot…

The hell with the rules: we’re talking about Rock ‘n’ Roll here, so what looks cool rules, and especially more so if it rhymes. Sheesh…

[John Hudson]

Röck ‚n‘ Röll

[quadibloc]

@John Hudson:
U+0060 is a spacing grave accent

Back in the old days of ASCII, U+0060 was a grave accent only to the same extent as U+0022 was an umlaut and U+0027 was an acute accent. That is, one possible unconventional coding was to overstrike those characters, and have their shape altered on sophisticated systems, or their meaning recognized by humans for output fr0m unsophisticated ones, to attain accents.

That this exotic coding is now claimed as the primary meaning of the character in the Unicode standard... is, I suppose, possible, but if so it does not give me great confidence in the committee responsible.

On the other hand, I will admit that U+005E was changed from an exponentiation symbol or up-arrow to a spacing caret back when ASCII-64 gave way to ASCII-68 (and lowercase was added). So this trend could indeed have continued when Unicode came along.

However, it does appear you are basically right, the story being made plain here:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html

but as you can see, this situation is a changed compared to long-established usage... and not just in the X Window System either, but in countless ASCII terminals.

[joeclark]

I simply cannot believe a British typographer would claim the following:

Is there a need for an apostrophe character distinct from the right-quote character? I don't think so: written and typographic practice is for these two characters to be identical, and I can't think of any behaviour distinctions.

Yet here we are.

Do I have to look up any of several of my photographs of sentences (and, worse, lines) using half-assed British quotation-mark rules that end in ’ and you cannot figure out what it means until the next line starts?

Have you never had to convert British quotes to U.S./Canadian quotes and found it next to impossible without manually inspecting the closing half of every quotation?

I thought Bringhurst was the only British typographer with a tendency to decree that real-world scenarios are impossible by definition so follow my advice and please stop bothering me.

[hrant]

Joe, I for one would love to see your collection of examples of -what might be called- "apostrophe envy".

hhp

[hrant]

Just so I'm clear: Is an apostrophe in text always encoded as a RIGHT SINGLE QUOTE MARK?

What are the chances somebody would write a Word and/or InDesign plug-in that goes through a text and changes the "intended apostrophes" to U+02BC? And/or some custom code point.

hhp

[John Hudson]

Joe: Do I have to look up any of several of my photographs of sentences (and, worse, lines) using half-assed British quotation-mark rules that end in ’ and you cannot figure out what it means until the next line starts?

But it is precisely because written and typographic practice is for the right quote and apostrophe to be identical that such ambiguities occur. I'm not saying that there might not be reasons to want to distinguish them, I'm saying that's not how our writing system works. Sure, make the case that they should be distinguished, using the many examples you can surely find: that way lies spelling reform, alphabet reform, and tinfoil hats.

Anyway, who you callin' a typographer?