Difference between revisions of "Which apostrophe character should I use"

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[[Category:Documentation]]

Revision as of 00:30, 27 February 2019

Many languages use an apostrophe-like character.

The problem this presents is that the traditional apostrophe (like what we use in English) is a punctuation character. It works okay for saying something's "elided" (like in something's), but it's not appropriate to represent a segment (like glottal stop in Tongan), super-segment (like aspiration in Nivkh or ejective status in Navajo), or modifier (like in Uzbek). There are special characters for this.

Here are some common apostrophe-like characters:

symbol name codepoint use for what
' apostrophe U0027 misc
` backtick U0060
ʻ turned comma / ʻokina U02BB glottal stop (in Polynesian languages)
ʼ U02BC glottal stops, aspiration, etc.
‘ U2018 start quote
’ U2019 end quote