[Wikitext-l] French apostrophe

[Andrew Dunbar]

On 18/11/2007, Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> David Gerard a écrit :
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitext-l
> >
> > Wikitext-l was formed from a recent discussion on wikitech-l about the
> > need to sanely reimplement the current parser, which is a Horrible
> > Mess and pretty much impossible to reimplement in another language.
> >
> > The MediaWiki parser definition is literally "whatever the PHP parser
> > does." Some of what it does is arguably very wrong, pathological,
> > magical or just a Stupid Parser Trick. So the list has been formed to
> > come up with a grammar that defines all the useful parts of the
> > present parser, and so can be used by anyone to implement a MediaWiki
> > wikitext parser. This will be useful for other software, for WYSIWYG
> > editing extensions ... all manner of things.
> >
> > Some of what some people would think of as a "stupid parser trick" is
> > in fact important - e.g. L'''uomo'' which renders as L<i>uomo</i>
> > (necessary for French and Italian).
>
> Actually, the proper French apostrophe should be ' (Unicode : U2019,
> Code HTML : &rsquo;) not '
> On the French Wikisource, we systematically replace ' with ' in all
> articles and titles with bots (keeping redirects). So actually, '''
> should be ''' in proper French typography.
>
> The issue is that ' is not in the standard French keyboard, and it does
> not exist in Latin1 (like œ for oe). There is also the problem with
> broken softwares, like copy-paste in a non compliant Unicode editor,
> etc. That's why it is so really used.

U2019 is the correct apostrophe for English and all European languages,
not just French. We use it on the English Wiktionary but it has met with
great resistance on the English Wikipedia. The straight apostrophe was
invented with the typewriter and dominates the computer and Internet
world due to the legacy of ASCII.

I've been thinking about whether a new parser could handle all
apostrophe issues at once, including converting '' to italic, ''' to bold,
and ' to the correct curved apostrophe, opening or closing or closing
single quote mark, and possibly even handle the case of Napolitan.

Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)

> > - d.
>
> Regards,
>
> Yann
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