That’s how we should be pronouncing apostrophe, according to the OED: “It ought to be of three syllables in Eng. as in French, but has been ignorantly confused with the prec. word”—the prec. word being apostrophe ‘A figure of speech, by which a speaker or writer suddenly stops in his discourse, and turns to address pointedly some person or thing, either present or absent; an exclamatory address.’ The name of the punctuation mark, you see, is not from Greek/Latin apostrophê (which would justify the extra syllable) but (via French apostrophe—three syllables!) from Latin apostrophus, itself from “Greek ἡ ἀπόστροϕος (sc. προσῳδία ‘the accent’) ‘of turning away, or elision.’” So there’s no earthly reason to say “apostro-fee,” and yet we do anyway, perverse creatures that we are. Why don’t all the preservers of the purity of English take up this cause, now that they realize the error of everyone’s ways? I’d like to hear William F. Buckley lean back in his inimitable way and denounce “the illiterate use of apostroffs in plurals.”
But of course that’s a fantasy; the preservers ignore the ahistorical pronunciation and focus on that damnable plural use. In fact, according to the latest lament for the apostrophe, a Telegraph article by Matt Born, the “‘greengrocer’s apostrophe’—so-called because of shopkeepers’ propensity to display signs for ‘pear’s’ or ‘banana’s'” is the object of ever-increasing angst; it’s spreading so fast that “it threatens to undermine what has long been a strict rule of grammar.” Worst of all, “over time it may become acceptable.” I leave to the imagination the horrors that such an outcome would unleash upon an already suffering world.
But wait: what does the OED say in small type, there at the end of definition 2 (“The sign (‘) used to indicate the omission of a letter or letters… and as a sign of the modern English genitive or possessive case”)? It says… it says…
In the latter case, it originally marked merely the omission of e in writing, as in fox’s, James’s, and was equally common in the nominative plural, esp. of proper names and foreign words (as folio’s = folioes); it was gradually disused in the latter, and extended to all possessives, even where e had not been previously written, as in man’s, children’s, conscience’ sake. [Emphasis added.]
Why, that means that the apostrophe was originally, and thus properly, used in the plural; those greengrocers are right, and the Apostrophe Protection Society is wrong! Surely the Williams (Buckley and Safire) and the other preservers will lay off the ancient plural apostrophe and begin working on excising that excrescent final syllable. (OED citations and links to article and Society courtesy of The Discouraging Word, which should not be held responsible for the puckishly antinomian stance taken by this website.)
Trenchant and devilishly backed up with the etymological fine print, but still: I have to admit that the inverted comma just gets under my skin when used to form plural’s. I agree that it probably doesn’t mean the culture is falling apart any more rapidly than the existence of, say, Access Hollywood already indicates. But it rubs my fur the wrong way, every time.
But what about the dreaded Acronymist’s Apostrophe?
That post was very fun to read. I’m always up for a taking Safire down a notch… but Buckley too? A bonanza!
Exactly! Well done! I’ve always jocularly refered to the mislaid apostroff — sounds like the pretender to the Czarist throne — in speech. Damn mine eyes, I was right. Keep up the fine entries.
I wanted to name my daughter “(prinsess) Apostrophe Tilde von Bladet”, but it turned out I don’t have a daughter.
Uh, using the apostrophe exclusively to indicate possessive or genitive usage aids clarity in writing, and thus should be encouraged. Sure, going into hysterics over any other usage is silly, but the principle is sound.
BT: Sure it does, and it rubs mine the wrong way too. Anyone who’s painfully learned the proper usages at the feet of Miss Throttlebottom in the early years of education (they do, after all, call it “grammar school”) can’t help but wince when they see them wantonly flouted. The point (and it’s one that I keep trying to make here at my tiny soapbox) is that those feelings, natural as they are, have nothing to do with historical truth, let alone with the Good and the Beautiful. It’s just like having a fondness for bananas because you grew up eating them, or hating (as I do) to see the sign change from PAN AM to MET LIFE at the top of that large ugly building that looms over Grand Central. It’s not the emotions that bother me, it’s the need to justify them by specious historico-logical reasoning, which leads to unnecessary snobbish condemnation of those who don’t follow the same usage.
Aidan: Please. If you’ll give it a moment’s thought, you’ll see that it wouldn’t make a bit of difference if the apostrophe didn’t exist at all. You can’t hear it, after all, and yet we somehow manage to communicate orally. There is no “principle.” It’s pure conservatism, wanting to go on as we began and keep the forms we’re used to. That’s fine with me (I’m conservative by nature), I just don’t like it gussied up with elitist nonsense.
i imagine the apo’strophe will become part
of the letter S within a hundred year’s
(even in name’s).
your’s in the united ‘state’s,
m.
Heh. Yeah, the apostrophe is the bane of the language purists here too, because in German it seems to become more popular to introduce apostrophes into possessive forms in names like you do in English, when in German there is supposed to be no apostrophe there. You are only supposed to but an apostrophe there if the name already ends with an “s” sound (like s, z, ß, tz, x etc), yet lots of people seem to like the “look” with the extra apostrophe between the name and the s. Of course apostrophes get sometimes randomly inserted into plural forms as well, something which those who bemoan the extra apostrophe (when it’s merely used like in English) as a sure sign of the end times for the German language, find even more awful.
I can’t comment (famous as I am in certain circles for my persnickety grammar and punctuation and typography rants, usually followed by, “Um, Kip? I think you split an infinitive in that, and misused an en-dash, and your kerning on that one title seriously needs work,” so), but I will share my absolute favorite (?) misuse of the apostroph’, as seen printed on the back of a truck delivering something or other:
But can we bitch about people who turn Smart Quotes™ on without thinking and then use the open-single-quote – ‘ – when they mean to use the apostrophe? When something’s been elided from the beginning of something, like hacking the “20” or “19” off a year, say, or when they type “‘cause” when they mean “’cause”? ’Cause that really sticks in my persnickety craw.
Yes, we certainly can. In my other life as a mild-mannered editor, I have to deal with smart and dumb quotes and apostroffs constantly, and it drives me mad, mad I tell you. (Or at least causes my manners to unmild.)
LH: Please. If you’ll give it a moment’s thought, you’ll see that it wouldn’t make a bit of difference if the apostrophe didn’t exist at all.
Really? Okay, if you don’t mind, I’m going to take an analogous example from French, because as a second language it’s one I’ve had to think about in depth (detail-wise) more recently. Would it make a bit of difference if “cette” were written exactly the same as “sept”? I submit that it would; useful constructions along the lines of « A sept heure, on voit souvent de touristes qui se promènent par là. » become as useless as they are in the spoken language.
Written language is often used to express shades of meaning that are more considered and more rich than those of spoken language–there’s nothing wrong with that, it equally takes more time to prepare and is often examined more closely than its spoken counterpart. It also doesn’t have any body language or tone of voice cues. The more accepted customs it has, the more redundancy of information there is, the easier it is to follow what is meant. And as it becomes easier to follow what is meant, it becomes easier to express subtle distinctions and shifts in emphasis. Communication is easy. Meaning is clear. These are good things, and should be encouraged.
And as to the elitism accusation; I’m from the country of Finnegans Wake. One of the few regular newspapers (newspapers!) we got in my house growing up was the Farmers Journal. I look across the street from here and I see two signs for the one establishment, one saying “Gallagher’s Restaurant,” and the other “Gallaghers Restaurant.” I only started using the apostrophe consistently myself in the early years of college. I love where I’m from. I don’t consider someone less intelligent if they get it wrong; I meet too many manifestly smart people of that ilk every day to do that. I do think clarity and accuracy of communication make the world easier for everyone, though.
Aidan: Sorry, didn’t mean to come off as accusing you of elitism—it’s just my reflex response to the cry of “write it right!” And obviously I was exaggerating when I said it wouldn’t make a bit of difference; clearly it would make some difference. My point was simply that people are so used to the rules they know that they exaggerate their importance and usefulness. The capital letter for nouns in German is useful too, in a marginal sort of way, but it seems clear to me that German wouldn’t really lose anything but tradition by eliminating them. (The elimination of Chinese characters, on the other hand, would entail much more serious losses.)
Again, I’m not opposing the rules as such (I make my living from them, after all), just poking a little fun at those who take them too seriously. And I certainly agree with your final statement.
Interesting that nobody else has pointed this out: the emphasised expression in the OP is a little misleading, because the passage as a whole seems to indicate that the apostrophe wasn’t used for *all* nominative plurals, but just for those that normally ended in “es” (and even then only when the ‘e’ was omitted). Most times when I see people trying to put an apostrophe on a plural, it’s not to replace a missing ‘e’….
“-‘-” wow for such a poor little scribble, it do upset so many Academians.(note c). The L.A. Times had a columnist on the rampage about that itty bitty mark. When an action makes it easier to be lazier and at the same time increases the profit of the organisations that can benefit form this fundamental weakness of the human spirit. The mark was used to save money by those early printers when every letter was set by hand (lead cost money too, and ran out of vowels) and the space savings on folio paper was tremendous. Make sense’ to be lazy after all it, one must save time and energy of the printer and typist .other short cut was the ” &” amphersand, .Note: Time is money . If you want to make One’s work to be meaningful and understandable then put in the “of the” not the B*****” A*********. I mean one gets upset over that mark when no one does when the the New York Subway banned” please and thank you ” because it saved so much time and money. As for the the “infamous nineteen” ‘Twas omitted because memory in the 60’s and 70′ cost a dollar a bit and the savings in memory was humungeous 16 bits or 32 bits ’twas astronomical. Now you get 1 Gig of memory for a dollar, Of course the typist does save time unless they have to look up the rule to see if they do not upset the purists (sorry Pure of mind)
Don–initially ‘s for possessives was only used to replace e in -es genetives, too, though. So if the possessive construction eventually spread to encompass all possessives, why not the plural construction? 🙂
As for the apostrophe versus single-quotation mark problem, my software chooses for me. Not only that, but my word-processing software chooses one way, and my web-editing software chooses the other way, and sometimes I cut and paste from the former to the latter, producing a mixed result. So cut me an effing break, willya?
I also sometimes knowingly use the apostrophe wrongly for plurals. Somehow transliterations of Chinese words don’t look right when pluralized with “s”. So if you are talking about tes, lis, and shus (correct), somehow it works better if you write about te’s, li’s, and shu’s (incorrect).
> .other short cut was the ” &” amphersand, .Note: Time is money
The ampersand may have been designed to save time and space (et in the form of a ligature) but I love the way that it scored such a long name:
The word ampersand is a conflation (combination) of “and, per se and”. Per se means “by itself”, and so the phrase translates to “&, standing by itself, means ‘and'”. This was at the end of the alphabet as it was recited by children in old English schools. The words ran together and were associated with “&”. The “ampersand” spelling dates from 1837. — HyperDictionary
So how are we supposed to be pronouncing apostrophe? aPOStroph or apoSTROPH?
Not being a scolar; I do note that there was a symbol used in the 17C[entury] that had the appearance of “&” wot{what} was it called at that period of time? also the Diary of John Evelyn dosed up the entries with “&” and lopped of endings of popular words like Colonel as Coll: , Bro: Jack etc., he put ‘d for ed or or ommitt’d the “thing” all to gether (din’d with,Martyr’d or dind sometimes din[e]d) then save more space do writ’ ” L. Marq: of Ormond &c.” Or was this E.S. de Beer version of Evelyns Kalendararium.
(this input does not accept upper case comma or upper case period). I will leave the Original reading of the manuscript to the Experts.
srah, dungbeetle: Good questions both. I imagine the pronunciation would have begun as apoSTROF (direct from French) and changed to aPOStrof if it had stayed a trisyllable; compare Trafalgar, which began as trafalGAR. And I too am curious about what the & symbol was called before the oh-so-cute and-per-se-and nomenclature; simply “et” perhaps (as still called by proofreaders reading aloud)? I googled “history of the ampersand” and got only a poem by Norman Dubie containing the lines “His history of the ampersand/ as clear Sanskrit drool….”—which doesn’t really help. It’s quite a nice poem, though, full of Khandro and tigers eating cellists and “cadets in their basaltic wilderness” and “birds crying:/ né-too vic, né-too vic,/ the six syllables like a butcher’s knives” and the Port of Gommed-Kyi-Pnalbyorh and the Plain of Jars and good stuff like that. The rewards of serendipity.
For the record, srah and LH, the Germans say Apostroph – just like they spell it 🙂
The apostrophe usage that annoys me most is when it’s used as if it were the same thing as all French accents at once. I once knew a girl whose legal name was “Renee'”.
There’s a hair salon in Northeast PA called “La’ Belle Vous”. This not only makes the assumption that the French word “la” has an accent on it (or that it can be made more exotic by adding an accent), but it also makes the assumption that a word is just as French and exotic with an apostrophe in place of the accent.
[Posted by: RatC at August 22, 2003 09:59 AM]
I can’t comment (famous as I am in certain circles for my persnickety grammar and punctuation and typography rants, usually followed by, “Um, Kip? I think you split an infinitive in that, and misused an en-dash, and your kerning on that one title seriously needs work,” so), but I will share my absolute favorite (?) misuse of the apostroph’, as seen printed on the back of a truck delivering something or other:
Its’ the best!
But can we bitch about people who turn Smart Quotes™ on without thinking and then use the open-single-quote – ‘ – when they mean to use the apostrophe? When something’s been elided from the beginning of something, like hacking the “20” or “19” off a year, say, or when they type “‘cause” when they mean “’cause”? ’Cause that really sticks in my persnickety craw.
RatC, ICAM. It really irks me when people write ‘‘tis’ when correctly it should be spelled ‘’tis’, with the apostroph pointing toward the chopped letter. Following such a rule, it’s incorrect to write ‘Top o’ the mornin’ to you you!’, but rather ‘Top o‘ the mornin‘ to you!’ IS.
[Posted by: Chris at August 22, 2003 10:30 PM]
As for the apostrophe versus single-quotation mark problem, my software chooses for me. Not only that, but my word-processing software chooses one way, and my web-editing software chooses the other way, and sometimes I cut and paste from the former to the latter, producing a mixed result. So cut me an effing break, willya?
I also sometimes knowingly use the apostrophe wrongly for plurals. Somehow transliterations of Chinese words don’t look right when pluralized with “s”. So if you are talking about tes, lis, and shus (correct), somehow it works better if you write about te’s, li’s, and shu’s (incorrect).
I agree, Chris.
[Posted by: dungbeetle at August 23, 2003 05:14 PM]
srah, dungbeetle: Good questions both. I imagine the pronunciation would have begun as apoSTROF (direct from French) and changed to aPOStrof if it had stayed a trisyllable; compare Trafalgar, which began as trafalGAR. And I too am curious about what the & symbol was called before the oh-so-cute and-per-se-and nomenclature; simply “et” perhaps (as still called by proofreaders reading aloud)? I googled “history of the ampersand” and got only a poem by Norman Dubie containing the lines “His history of the ampersand/ as clear Sanskrit drool….”—which doesn’t really help. It’s quite a nice poem, though, full of Khandro and tigers eating cellists and “cadets in their basaltic wilderness” and “birds crying:/ né-too vic, né-too vic,/ the six syllables like a butcher’s knives” and the Port of Gommed-Kyi-Pnalbyorh and the Plain of Jars and good stuff like that. The rewards of serendipity.
I came upon THIS site by Googling ‘ampersand’ o_O. But.. I don’t care how it got it’s name, it’s still short for ‘Et’ meaning ‘and’ even if it’s been fancied up.
Oh, sorry –quoted the wrong people. I don’t like the spacing on this page, personally..
I took the liberty of editing your comment to put the quoted material in italics and the misleading “Posted by” lines (which, as you discovered, go to the preceding comments) in brackets; hopefully this will make your comment easier to figure out.
Now, I’m mystified by this:
“It really irks me when people write ‘‘tis’ when correctly it should be spelled ‘’tis’, with the apostroph pointing toward the chopped letter. Following such a rule, it’s incorrect to write ‘Top o’ the mornin’ to you you!’, but rather ‘Top o‘ the mornin‘ to you!’ IS.”
Certainly “’tis” is what we’d want, but how is it illuminating to say that the apostrophe is “pointing to the chopped letter”? In the nature of the case, the chopped letter is absent, and to point to it would require a good deal more diacritic digit-waggling than any punctuation mark is capable of. And if the position vacated by the absent letter is to be pointed to, it could be pointed to from either side, with either ‘ or ’.
The simple fact of the matter is that the “directed” or “turned” apostrophe has, for all practical purposes, the form of a closing single quote as opposed to the form of an opening single quote. It’s just that some well-known word-processors understandably lack the AI to distinguish the apostrophe in “’tis”, for example, from an opening quote. Of course, in practice that problem is a mere inconvenience that is easily overcome.
None of the above applies to the mark in “M‘Naghten”, which is traditionally so executed, though the word is commonly rendered “M’Naghten” these days.
Now, I’m mystified by this:
“It really irks me when people write ‘‘tis’ when correctly it should be spelled ‘’tis’, with the apostroph pointing toward the chopped letter. Following such a rule, it’s incorrect to write ‘Top o’ the mornin’ to you you!’, but rather ‘Top o‘ the mornin‘ to you!’ IS.”
Certainly “’tis” is what we’d want, but how is it illuminating to say that the apostrophe is “pointing to the chopped letter”? In the nature of the case, the chopped letter is absent, and to point to it would require a good deal more diacritic digit-waggling than any punctuation mark is capable of. And if the position vacated by the absent letter is to be pointed to, it could be pointed to from either side, with either ‘ or ’.
The simple fact of the matter is that the “directed” or “turned” apostrophe has, for all practical purposes, the form of a closing single quote as opposed to the form of an opening single quote. It’s just that some well-known word-processors understandably lack the AI to distinguish the apostrophe in “’tis”, for example, from an opening quote. Of course, in practice that problem is a mere inconvenience that is easily overcome.
None of the above applies to the mark in “M‘Naghten”, which is traditionally so executed, though the word is commonly rendered “M’Naghten” these days.
Posted by Noetica at March 22, 2005 04:19 PM
I know that.. Obviously, it’s not, ”Finally she awoke from her deep sleep.“, but instead, “Finally she awoke from her deep sleep.” OR “Finally she awoke from her deep sleep.”, with two equal ‘dumb’ quotes; that I do not contest.
However, I am thuroughly bewildered, as to who or what is ‘M‘Naghten’ is.. Well, mind sharing?? :~)
Also,.. Isn’t it only the slightest bit odd that the dates for which this URL page people posted their notes was all within the year of 2003, even more precisely within April of that year, but that NOW – on the twenty-second day of March A.D.2005 – all of a sudden two more people leave a note??
“Finally she awoke from her deep sleep.” « my fault.
Victor: The M‘Naghten rules have been the basis of the insanity plea in English law for over 150 years. (Not to tell my grandmother how to suck eggs, but googling the name would have instantly gotten you that information.) And there’s no mystery about the sudden activity; your comment showed up in the “Recently commented on” section of the sidebar, so I found and responded to it, and my response kept the entry on the sidebar, where Noetica presumably found it.
A point of etiquette: It’s not very helpful to copy an entire comment — just copy the bits you’re responding to, and it helps to put them in italics (put an i in angle brackets before, and /i in angle brackets after). In this case, since you were responding to the comment immediately preceding, there was really no need to quote it; you could have just said “I know that,” and it would have been clear what you were responding to.
language hatL
Actually, I did Google it before I asked, and didn’t find it.. so, yea. And as far as etiquette goes, I was doing what I saw showed the most clarity. At any rate..
Dear Sir,
I am writing a paper about Turkish economy. There is a headline that goes “Share of EU Countries in Turkey’s Volume of Trade”. But would it be a mistake when I use it as “Share of EU Countries in Turkeys’ Volume of Trade”
Yes it would, unless you’re talking about a flock of turkeys.
Sorry but the name of my country is “Türkiye”. What if I write as “Share of EU Countries in
Turkiyes’ Volume of Trade”. Would it still be a proper sentence that mentioning “Turkish Volume of Trade.
The name of your country is Türkiye in Turkish but Turkey in English, just as the name of my country is the United States of America in English but Amerika Birleşik Devletleri in Turkish. It makes no more sense to put “Türkiye” in an English-language headline than it would to put “United States” in a Turkish one. If you’re writing in English, you need to use the English words for things. “Share of EU Countries in Turkey’s Volume of Trade” is fine.
quoth zizka: Somehow transliterations of Chinese words don’t look right when pluralized with “s”. So if you are talking about tes, lis, and shus (correct), somehow it works better if you write about te’s, li’s, and shu’s (incorrect).
One of my teachers resolved that dilemma (as to Sanskrit) with a middot: Kaurava·s.
On yet another hand, why would you want to stick an explicit plural morpheme on a Chinese word?
In June, Turkey followed the Ivory Coast by announcing that its official name in English, and presumably all Latin-script languages, is “Türkiye”. According to the NPR story, “some [Turks] wish to dissociate the country’s name from the bird that traditionally appears on American dining tables at Thanksgiving and from the slang definition of a turkey as something that doesn’t work or is foolish.” The U.N. has gone along with this.
But I won’t.
I will still call (the bird) “misirka” in English, just because why not. ‘s fun.
Everything good comes from Egypt, e.g. mısır (polenta).
I continue to deplore the use of diacritics in supposedly English (or Latin) text.
Including the dot above “i”, I suppose?
Everything good comes from Egypt, e.g. mısır (polenta).
Αχ, Μισιρλού…
Yesterday, my best friend and I were having our weekly lunch discussion at work. He mentioned that one of the problem graduate students (who left the program several semesters ago, but after having done enough research to produce a decent dissertation) had turned a draft of another section of his thesis-in-progress. Apparently, in this section, the student used symbols with grave accents to denote certain versions of quantities. (There are a substantial number of voltage measurements reported on in the thesis, some of which differ from one another in fairly subtle ways. Apparently the student was trying to develop a good way of distinguishing the symbols for these slightly different voltages. I seriously doubt that there are really enough measurement types that accents are a good idea, but it’s not my problem.) As we were discussing this, I had the humorous idea of changing the way I read mathematical symbols adorned with extra markings—instead of saying the name of the diacritic, treating it as pronunciation guide. For example, a complexified external harmonic torque, Ñ, would be “enyay” [ˈeɲe], rather than “en tilde.” Then, by extension, Õ would be “oh-yay.” The second derivative of A gets pronounced like the letter Ä, unit vectors hats are treated as caret diacritics, and the empty set could be pronounced as a Norwegian “ø.”
So the time derivative of /q/ is /i/, expressed in /ɔ/?
according to the OED: “It ought to be of three syllables in Eng. as in French, but has been ignorantly confused with the prec. word”
That sentence has been deleted from the online entry; they have a project to purge embarrassing quaintness, even in entries that haven’t had their full revision yet.
Speaking of apostrophes, I only recently noticed that the OED3, alone among publications as far as I know, uses *both* straight and curly marks: apostrophes are straight ('), closing single quote marks are curly (’ aka high-9). This distinction is also visible in the “previous version: OED2 (1989)” pages, even though the print OED2 used curly marks for both.
They impose this distinction on quotations, too: compare how they show this quote for greengrocer's apostrophe:
to the original:
And they’ve changed the Guardian’s double quotation marks to British-standard single quotation marks, too. They do the same for quotation marks from American sources. What happened to fidelity to the source?
(Reasonable fidelity, that is, not perfect fidelity. Obviously every quotation is transcribed (whether from manuscript, audio recording, or print), and nobody expects them to reproduce visual features such as font, linebreaks, ligatures, or letterform variants like the long s. They also insert capitalization at the beginning of quotations and punctuation at the end, and I’m okay with that. The line has to be drawn somewhere, but I would put it before changing the quotation marks and apostrophes.)
It must take considerable editing care and attention to put in a distinction that wasn’t there in the source, and I don’t understand why they think it’s worth it.
I don’t either. The OED is getting weirder by the day…
@hat
I am not sure this is weird; the OED might be maintained as a large electronic database. In that case, the administrator would run consistency checks and rather than ignore some “failures”, just “fix” them.
The problem (as with so many things these days) is that the focus is on some “higher” function (in this case database consistency, in many others maximizing profit) rather than on what in simpler times was considered the important thing (in this case, the actual entries).
kt:
It must take considerable editing care and attention to put in a distinction that wasn’t there in the source, and I don’t understand why they think it’s worth it.
If OED is shifting toward straightening all apostrophes and curling all quotation marks in its examples, I’m all in favour. How much easier that would make life for anyone researching punctuation. As you point out, “nobody expects them to reproduce visual features such as font, linebreaks, ligatures, or letterform variants like the long s”. Well, some users might want some fastidious preservations of such sorts, for their own good research reasons.
You continue: “They also insert capitalization at the beginning of quotations and punctuation at the end, and I’m okay with that. The line has to be drawn somewhere, but I would put it before changing the quotation marks and apostrophes.” It’s interesting to see what you’d want kept, and what not. Your choices might be seen as arbitrary: but I don’t doubt that you could give reasons.
Also interesting, and perhaps related, is your assumption of some objective (or at least commonly accepted) ordering among features by aptness for preservation. We must “draw the line” somewhere, as if by itself this would be a way to partition the set of features. I don’t share that assumption. Is a mark’s identity as an apostrophe (or a single quotation mark) more important than an s being originally a long or a short s (something almost equally rule-governed and determinable by further investigation, for a text and a geotemporal milieu)? For me, certainly. But for everyone?
It’s certainly useful in text-searching to distinguish apostrophe from single-close-quote, so I am glad if the OED provides this facility for its users.
If a source uses the same glyph for both marks, an OED editor can usually calculate with confidence which was meant in a particular instance. Ideally there would be a third character for any uncertain cases, sort of like /// hyphen-minus D; – [edit : Dunno how to make a solitary hyphen-minus ; blog software smart-converts it to endash ] /// hyphen ‐ /// minus − ///
– test
Edit: wow, even a hyphen surrounded by nbsp is still turned into a dash.
PlasticPaddy: You’re assuming that consistency checks can be done by some algorithm. As David-Antoine Williams reports, the distinction between apostrophes and single close-quotes was not coded by the typists for OED2; it must have been added sometime later. You may be imagining some rule like, “number of close-quotes must be equal to number of open-quotes, and any leftovers are apostrophes”. Now, which are the leftovers? How do you know which is the apostrophe, given input like this, as typed in?
To make that choice you need to understand the role of butchers' in the sentence, and you need to know that meat' is not a possible apheresis. Show me the algorithm that can do that. If you’re thinking they flagged all leftovers for human attention, that must be at least tens of thousands of quotations. That’s a significant investment of staff time, so it has to have been a policy decision. Consider the hand-crafting that must have been needed to format this historically influential quotation illustrating whammy, from Li’l Abner:
(This also raises the question of fidelity, since comparison to the original shows that italics are standing in for bold lettering in the original word balloon, and the OED has not only replaced double quotation marks with single ones but also double !! with single !.)
There are also a few rare mistakes in new OED3 material, suggesting that they don’t run automated checks on it, for example under spice, n. Draft additions January 2018:
mollymooly: “It’s certainly useful in text-searching to distinguish apostrophe from single-close-quote, so I am glad if the OED provides this facility for its users.”
It doesn’t. That’s one reason why this irritates me. Maybe it works for insiders, but for mere subscribers, the search function returns the same set of results on quotation searches for butchers, butchers', and butchers’. The “Exact characters” check-box has no effect. (There *is* a difference in how the terms are highlighted in the results list, but it’s not enough to filter by.)
it seems clear to me that German wouldn’t really lose anything but tradition by eliminating them.
DM’s counterexamples (which, as he says, are disambiguated in speech by intonation).
It doesn’t.
It doesn’t and it can’t. There is no distinction in Unicode between a (curled) apostrophe and a closing (in English-language typography) single-quote mark: they are the same character. Typewriter apostrophes are kept separate for hysterical raisins, and only exist at all because it was necessary to keep down the number of keys on actual typewriter keyboards (you used to have to type an exclamation mark as apostrophe-backspace-period). For the same reason, uncurled apostrophes are used in programming languages, as keypunch keyboards had even fewer keys than typewriter keyboards. There should be no uncurled characters in the OED text or the text of any other published work unless it is concerned with programming languages or typography.
What is kept separate, despite the lack of graphical distinction, is the left-side curled letter used for Polynesian and other languages, so that when you double-click on a word you get the whole word and not just a piece of it, as well as more sophisticated analyses. Thus Hawaiʻi is right and Hawai‘i and Hawai’i are wrong (though Chrome does not respect the distinction). Similarly Klingon taʼpuq ‘prince’ with a right-side curled letter appears in the title of the translation of The Little Prince; it would be wrongly divided into two words if written ta’puq.
For “Polynesian and other” read “Polynesian”. In high-quality Tahitian typography, the ʻeta character is rotated 90 degrees clockwise compared to the Hawaiʻian ʻokina, but this is considered a font distinction and not reflected in Unicode.
Firefox does respect the distinction between the punctuation marks and the letters if you double-click; Edge uses the same engine as Chrome and so does not.
It doesn’t and it can’t.
You are not paying attention. Go back and read what I wrote, magnified large enough that you can see the difference between straight apostrophe ' (U+0027) and curly apostrophe/close quote ’ (U+2019). I was careful to evade the blog’s auto-formatting in order to write exactly what I meant. The OED has changed U+2019 to U+0027 in its text when it represents an apostrophe, but its search function collapses that distinction, and does not provide an option not to do so. The distinction is still *there* in the search results, though; Firefox control-F can tell the difference, if “Match Diacritics” is checked. The OED could provide the same option, if they bothered.
There should be no uncurled characters in the OED
Regardless of what you think should be, they’re there now, and it can’t have happened by accident; they were all curly marks in the print editions, and it must have taken a lot of trouble to separate out the ones that represent apostrophes and change them to straight marks with extremely high accuracy. *I* don’t think it was a worthwhile investment, but they didn’t ask me.
Wikipedia actually deprecates curly quotation marks/apostrophes and requires only straight ones.
The OED has changed U+2019 to U+0027 in its text when it represents an apostrophe
I see: you are quite right. Looking at the headword don't (noun), as in “do's and don'ts” (or “dos and don'ts”) makes that very clear.
I don’t think it was a worthwhile investment, but they didn’t ask me.
Nor do I.
If anyone wants to override the blog’s formatting without copying and pasting, use “'”, “‘”, “‘”, “& #x02BB;” (left side letter), or “& #x02BC;” (right side letter), with no spaces.
John C:
There should be no uncurled characters in the OED text or the text of any other published work unless it is concerned with programming languages or typography.
There we differ. Such thinking reminds me of presumed reasons for disabling underline, in the system adopted at the Hattery. Technerds appear to have accepted that underlining is “deprecated”, and that no one adept at modern communication could conceivably need it. How wrong they are.
The same tendency is evident with Microsoft of course. Word still only sometimes lets a no-width non-break character do its valuable work when it follows an en dash: a damn nuisance, for example in citations or bibliographies when ranges use an en dash.
ktschwarz:
Wikipedia actually deprecates curly quotation marks/apostrophes and requires only straight ones.
It does. That’s a matter of house style, supported by good argument. As the most prolific contributor to the huge main page of Wikipedia’s Manual of Style (till I left there, ten years ago; still ranked as third most prolific) I advocated for straight quote marks and apostrophes. The advice has stood up against all attempts at “reform”; but of course it’s often ignored by editors in the articles. ‘Twas [sic; I typed a straight apostrophe, and the system curled it the wrong way] ever so, and so’t remains.
For “Polynesian and other” read “Polynesian”.
Not quite; it might only be a letter (in its own right) in Polynesian languages, but in very-much-not-Polynesian Uzbek, the same Unicode character (U+02BB MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA) is used as part of the letters/digraphs Oʻ oʻ and Gʻ gʻ, and can consequently appear in the middle of a word, as in Oʻzbekiston “Uzbekistan”.
Latin-script transliterations of Arabic frequently use multiple kinds of apostrophic signs to mean different things; I’m not sure which specific Unicode characters they correspond to.
and only exist at all because it was necessary to keep down the number of keys on actual typewriter keyboards
Having to work with pre-existing typewriters, with corresponding key assignment, had of course led to some… interesting developments; perhaps most clearly the tone letters in many SE Asian languages, but also the infamous-in-narrow-circles Natqgu orthography, which uses several otherwise-unneeded Latin consonant letters as additional vowel signs.
(I think I’ve mentioned somewhere before – maybe on LH, but if so, Google doesn’t find it – that Natqgu would be an interesting test case for one of those statistical engines that claims to be able to distinguish consonants from vowels for the purpose of language decipherment. Though we’d probably have to check if it works correctly with ROT-13 first.)
And then there’s the 1993-95 Turkmen alphabet, where the letter for /ʃ/ is uppercase $, lowercase ¢. (But they also used ſ [that is, long S] for lowercase /ʒ/, so it cannot just have been a typewriter thing, at least unless they had some really weird typewriters.)
Dealing with currency signs in case pairs would have been an interesting challenge for Unicode, but (un)fortunately that particular alphabet had gone out of use before Unicode ramped up enough for it to matter.
[the 1993 Turkmen alphabet] also used ſ
That was an oddity, and it died before the rest of that particular Turkmen alphabet did, in an ultimately useless attempt to make sure that all Turkmen letters were characters in the Windows-1252 repertoire.
the same Unicode character (U+02BB MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA) is used as part of the letters/digraphs Oʻ oʻ and Gʻ gʻ
I am surprised but not astonished, like Noah Webster’s wife. Once a character is in Unicode, it may be repurposed in all sorts of ways, especially by dictators with heavy-handed and whimsical ideas about “improvement”.
Dealing with currency signs in case pairs would have been an interesting challenge for Unicode
Not really. SpecialCasing.txt already has entries for the Lithuanian-specific and Turkish/Azeri-specific case pairs; new lines in this file would provide the necessary mapping for Turkmen. In addition, we already have (generic) casing pairs for non-letters, things like Ⓐ and ⓐ, which are both considered symbols.
@J1M, Arabic:
The sign for voiced pharingeal fricative (often heard as colouring of a vowel) is superscript c-sign. In Arabic script ع.
I saw in old European books two c’s (one above another), but in 19th century it is one half ring. Cf. also IPA sign for the same…
Accordingly, when an apostrophe is used, it must be oriented the same way to avoid confusion with the sign for glottal stop.
The sign for glottal stop in Arabic ء (or إ and أ and … ) is based on ع (the initial shape is عــــــ).
In transliteration it is any apostrophe that does not look like the former.
“In transliteration it is any apostrophe that does not look like the former.”
That is it should NOT look to the right.
“two c’s ”
two half-rings…
I should have mentioned I got them from the only style guide I ever read. I think the author was Wolf Schneider, der letzte Sprachpapst “the last language pope”.
the entire Albanian orthography, which is designed for French typewriters: ç and ë, plus ^ for nonstandard nasal vowels, otherwise ASCII.
Suddenly I’m reminded of the book NAJBOGATIJI SRBI SVETA (“The world’s richest Serbs”) by MARKO LOPU$INA…
Perhaps most often they’re the two Greek breathings.
I misread J1M’s comment.
I read “ transliterations of Arabic frequently use multiple kinds of apostrophic signs to mean different things; I’m not sure which ….” and despite “….specific Unicode characters they correspond to.” remembered that J1M is not sure which sound is designated by which apostrophe:-(
There must be systems that precisely specify Unicode signs, but globally it is a pleasant mess.
Danish has /apo’strof/, directly from the French or German. And the peeving starts when it’s used for the possessive, which standardly doesn’t have it (except after final {s} or [rare] {z} /s/ or {sch} /ʃ/ where it marks an omitted {s})–it’s Eriks and Lars’ [pronounced /lar?s/ with degemination or /lar?ses/ [laɐ̰ses]] with epenthesis. You can also write Larses in accordance with the second [now more frequent] pronunciation, but that is a little rebellious and I don’t think it was possible when the apostrophe convention was established. Erik’s is the peever fodder).
As for capitalized Nouns: the Germans left in ’45, the cNs in ’48 (nothing ever being a coincidence), and I’m sure leading Newspapers of the Time had Editorials about how that would increase Ambiguity and bring about the End of Civilization as we know it, and how they would uphold the Dignity of the Language and capitalize their Nouns for Ever(*) after. I think I read once that the staunchest Defender held out for like ten Years. (The same reform also removed verb plurals and the distinction (written only for 500 years) between past kunde/vilde and infinitive kunne/ville ‘can/will’, much to the relief of school children and [probably] horror of prescriptivists).
But it’s an ever-vanishing proportion of Danes who grew up learning to read with cNs, and the rest of us have no problems with lower case nouns. If people start putting an apostrophe before any word-ending {s} in English, you’ll get used to it right quick.
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(*) Kids had to learn a lot of “logical” rules by rote, like how altid on its own was an adverb, but in for Altid it was a noun. I probably got that one wrong, the rules being 25 years obsolete when I started school, but you can probably get similar stuff from current German practice.
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Experiment to see if
’“RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK” will survive WordPress’ tyranny and not be turned around: ’Tis. ’Tis. Whee, it works! Both as an HTML entity and as a “real” Unicode codepoint.Make that 18 years, I’m older than I look.
Captalisation of nouns annoys me (I remember how I found a German book published in early 19th century without capitalisation and in antiqua…). Perhaps its absence is just as annoying for practicioners.
And there are Chinese students annoyed with capitals (haven’t seen Arabic students complaining at that).
but you can probably get similar stuff from current German practice.
Yes, we have similar cases, but they changed the rules on these things substantially with the big spelling reform of 1996, and know I’m always confused as to whether what I recall about this is obsolete knowledge I remember from school or the current state of the rules.
I simply reject those spelling reforms, it makes life simpler. The people who try to change things keep changing their minds. In 1996 they told the nation that Fritten mit Majonäse is OK, twenty years later they turned tail:
#
Die eingedeutschte “Majonäse” wurde 2017 vom Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung zurückgezogen, jetzt gilt wieder die alte “Mayonnaise”.
#
Historischer Überblick bis 2018, mit den abgelichteten Visagen einiger Entscheidungstäter.
Oh!
Cyrillic can imitate that (somewhat unusually).
Майонез
Маёнез.
The second spelling is jokular.
/-jo-/ only happens in Russian in je > jo, spelled ё.
-Йо- is foreignising spelling.
Capitalization does sometimes, in German, disambiguate things that are (…generally…) disambiguated by intonation in speech.
Ausländer, die deutschen Boden verkaufen “foreigners who sell German soil”
Ausländer, die Deutschen Boden verkaufen “foreigners who sell soil to Germans”
Helft den armen Vögeln! “Help the poor birds!”
Helft den Armen vögeln! “Help the poor to boink!”
Wehret den Vögeln !
Wehret dem Vögeln !
Hitchcock vs. the Pope.