On Nov 28, 2007 3:47 AM, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 11:47:56AM +1100, Steve Bennett wrote:
So, the writer of this code (Magnus?) definitely knows about this limitation. The question is really:
- Does anyone really use this construct? We've heard that the French
use a curved apostrophe instead of the straight one in this situation.
Yup; that's what I keep saying. You're making a list of the "does anyone actually use this"'s, right?
It's a very common construct in Italian. See for example the first sentence of this article:
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amore
Apostrophes can be used to truncate articles and some other compound words:
un' l' dell' dall'
...etc. Any of these can be combined with italics or bold:
dell'''amore'' (apostrophe + italics) dell''''amore''' (apostrophe + bold)
Italian rules actually prescribe the curved apostrophe, but it's rarely used because it's not found in normal Italian keyboards. The Italian version of MS word automagically transform the regular apostrophe in the curved one in the right places, and sometimes you'll find articles in the Italian wikipedia which were copy&pasted from a word file and contain a curved apostrophe. But most of the time, the regular one is used in "online" text.
Alfio