Subject: bug#30815: 26.0.91; unicode right single quote mark with syntax entry of w not respected by forward-word

From: Aaron Jensen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2018 10:43:08 -0700

On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 9:09 AM, Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:
> But before we discuss this issue more, I think we need to talk about
> the goals.  E.g., is this only for text-derived modes, or also for
> programming modes?  More generally, why did you want to change the
> syntax entry of ’ ?

I wanted to change it because I started to use typo-mode:
https://github.com/jorgenschaefer/typoel which automatically turned
apostrophes I typed into right quotes in my org-mode files (which is
where I had it enabled). I was ok with this, but I wanted them to
behave like apostrophes did (not being word boundaries and all) so I
went down this path.

I have since unbound ' in that mode, so it just inserts a normal
apostrophe. I'm aware of the "controversy" surrounding the different
characters and, to be honest, I can't be bothered. Filing this bug was
a light weight attempt to see if I was missing something and/or if
this was unexpected.

For right quote in particular, it's probably even more nuanced. One
could use right quotes to close a single quoted piece of text. In
which case, that right quote probably shouldn't be a "word" in the
syntax table.

Because of all of that, I'm totally happy just using ' like a normal
person. I'm not an author writing manuscripts.

> The next question is what other characters need this special handling,
> and how many of them are there?

I do not know. None others that I know of, but that doesn't mean much.

> Btw, you should know that in some quarters using ’ as an apostrophe is
> anathema: they maintain one should use u+02B7 MODIFIER LETTER
> APOSTROPHE instead, in particular because it doesn't have the script
> disparity issue in this context.  See, for example, this URL:
>
>   https://tedclancy.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/which-unicode-character-should-represent-the-english-apostrophe-and-why-the-unicode-committee-is-very-wrong/

This is convincing enough for me and I didn't actually know about
U+02BC. That appears to work as it should out of the box. I'll open an
issue on typo-mode to see if they can add support for that.

I'm happy to consider this issue resolved (I know it's closed and was
merged into 10494) if everyone else is after the doc changes have been
merged in.

Thanks.