[tlhIngan Hol] Klingon Word of the Day: luS

[Daniel Dadap]

On May 24, 2019, at 02:17, Lieven L. Litaer <levinius at gmx.de> wrote:

>> Am 24.05.2019 um 02:53 schrieb SuStel:
>> I don't see how this leaves the apostrophe (U+0027) an acceptable
>> character to use.
> 
> Oh, I think you misunderstood me here. In my first messages I wrote
> 
> >> You have weird apostrophes there.
> >> I suggest simple ' or fancy ’, but never ‘.
> 
> This means I suggest U+0027 and U+2019, but never U+2018. It's only this
> last one I say you should not use.

SuStel isn’t asking this question because *he* thinks U+0027 is an unacceptable choice, but rather to ask why, given the reasons you listed for why U+2019 is a better choice, why U+0027 is acceptable as well. Indeed, this question refers back to the very same first message that you quoted above.

I suspect SuStel has his own reasons for thinking U+0027 is acceptable, as he consistently uses it to represent qaghwI'. I agree with both you and SuStel that U+2019 is the most aesthetically pleasing choice within the apostrophe/single-quote family, but I personally use U+0027 because I come from a pre-Unicode generation of computer users that frets over things like text encodings. Of course, I love Unicode (and would love it even more if it had an official mapping for pIqaD), and any computing device worth its salt these days will have proper support for Unicode, but nevertheless I retain a (mostly philosophical) preference for staying restricted to 7-bit ASCII for basic Latin script texts, which includes Klingon in the standard Okrandian orthography.

Everybody knows the only reason someone would use a left single quotation mark as a qaghwI' is because of “helpful” auto-correct “smart” quotes. I use them myself sometimes when I’m writing on a device that doesn’t make it easy to write the good old ASCII apostrophe. I don’t think anybody is making the conscious choice to use that character for qaghwI' unless they’re trying to be silly, like I was a few messages ago on this thread. And even if somebody did choose to do so intentionally for reasons other than being silly, so what? The worst thing you could really say about it is that it’s ugly, and others are free to disagree with that. Or, as De'vID mentioned, it could affect text searches, but any situation outside of “one true qaghwI'” will require some sort of concession to make text searches work, anyway. (In the iOS version of boQwI' I normalize both U+2018 and U+2019 to U+0027 before performing a search, for this reason.)