[tlhIngan Hol] Klingon Word of the Day: luS

[Daniel Dadap]

> On May 24, 2019, at 08:46, Lieven L. Litaer <levinius at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> Then look back at your first sentence: the word "isn’t" uses the U+2019
> apostrophe. Maybe you din't even notice?

That’s not a qaghwI', though. My own personal style, when I’m typing on my smartphone keyboard, which I did for that message and also for this one, is to allow it to do the normal smart quote things it does for English text, but use U+0027 for qaghwI' in Klingon text.

If I allowed smart quotes to take over for Klingon text, I’d get weird qaghwI' in words like the pronoun ‘e’, which in this particular instance I’ve allowed to use the characters that my phone decided I must have meant, since I obviously meant to enclose the letter e in single quotes. But if I were indeed writing in English, and wanted to say something like “I am trying to write the letter ‘e’ on the blackboard”, then I have no problem with the smart quotes, because they’re actually appropriate.

It’s completely appropriate for the apostrophe in “it’s” to be a right single quote. It’s also appropriate to use a right single quote as qaghwI’, as I have intentionally done just now. My personal choice to use the straight apostrophe as qaghwI' is because I don’t like the left single quotes either, yet autocorrect insists on using them sometimes. Since I have to override the behavior of autocorrect anyway, I might as well override it to the straight apostrophe, despite my aesthetic preference for the right single quote, since I have other, non-aesthetic reasons for preferring the straight apostrophe.