Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2009

The question is about fonts rather than grammar.
In most fonts the shapes of the comma and the apostrophe
are identical, and they differ only in vertical position.  But the
conventions of writing are:
1.  The apostrophe signals (some) possessive forms,
omitted letters, etc.
2.  The comma subdivides a sentence.
3.  Commas and apostrophes are different signs.

It all depends on context, as usual. In this case, though, the context
is not provided by the subject matter, but by the medium.

UseNet, where you have posted this question, is a text-only medium.
Though its capabilities have been extended over the years, it remains
best practice to use only standard ASCII characters on UseNet. Many
users will not see extended characters appear correctly: your
character U+2019 appeared as multiple characters here. Use 0027 in
text-only media.

Otherwise, it is a style question, not a correctness question.

Jim Deutch (JimboCat)
--
How do you denote an apostrophe in IPA? One hand clapping?

As you can see from Jimbocat's answer, the second alternative
doesn't work well on Usenet. It becomes
the Earth $)A !/ s Interior.

And as you can see from this answer, for me it becomes
the Earth?s Interior

James

This is not, as someone else in this thread mistakenly claimed, a font
question, nor should you be choosing Unicode characters based on their
appearance in a single font.

Here's the Unicode answer, from the code charts:

This combination of function does seem odd for a standard which
reconizes FIGURE DASH, EN DASH, and MINUS SIGN, all of which are
visually indistinguishable.  Here, by contrast, is what they say for
U+0027 APOSTROPHE:

Here's the slightly more complicated Usenet answer:

It is best to refrain from using non-ASCII characters in Usenet posts
except in foreign-language newsgroups where they are explicitly
welcome.  Even in that case, it is best to use the standard UTF-8
encoding, rather than the bizarre ISO-2022 encoding-switching escape
sequences, unless the newsgroup's conventions dictate another encoding
(e.g., ISO 8859-1 used to be required in many Western European
newsgroups prior to the widespread adoption of the Euro and of
Unicode).

Now, as it turns out, in the culture from which Usenet springs, the
1978 version of ASCII remained in use long after the introduction of
the 1983 revision (which aligned ASCII with ISO 646).  ASCII-78
permitted multiple interpretations of the character 2/7 ("'"): it
could be a quotation mark (paired with 6/0, "`"), or it could be an
apostrophe, depending entirely on context.  ISO 646 and ASCII-83
removed this option (and the related use of "`" as opening single
quote), but Unix, troff, TeX, X, and the original PostScript
StandardEncoding vector all retained the original usage, not to
mention numerous programming languages which all use ' to delimit
strings.

So, when posting to Usenet in English, you should generally refrain
from using Unicode punctuation.  (You should always refrain from using
Microsoft punctuation.)

-GAWollman