Dave Kemper writes: > On 4/29/17, Anthony J. Bentley <anth...@anjbe.name> wrote: > > Unicode made the decision a long time ago to consider U+2019 as both > > right single quotation mark and apostrophe; see the Apostrophes section > > of Unicode 9.0, chapter 6. > > Yes, and that remains a bad decision, because it conflates two > distinct marks of punctuation that have vastly different semantic > meanings, disallows automated checking for balanced quotation marks, > and causes other problems eloquently described in: > > https://tedclancy.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/which-unicode-character-should-rep > resent-the-english-apostrophe-and-why-the-unicode-committee-is-very-wrong/
The "balanced" argument doesn't make sense, because there are times where quotation marks would not be balanced. I'm thinking particularly of multi-paragraph quotes, which in English typically have an opening quote mark on each paragraph, but a closing quote mark only on the final. I disagree with most of the other arguments on that page too. In any case, it is a compromise made for historical reasons, quite common throughout Unicode and hardly the most egregious (certainly when compared to either UTF-16 or Han unification). But, well, I'm going quite off topic... -- Anthony J. Bentley
