ISO 639 - New item approved - N'Ko

[Michael Everson]

At 23:32 -0700 2006-06-07, Doug Ewell wrote:

>Choosing between a plain ASCII apostrophe and a 
>more typographically accurate, curly apostrophe 
>does not seem to me to constitute "alternative 
>names" in the same sense.

So much so that I wonder why this is an issue. I 
mean really. Why is this an issue?

>We even went so far as to use the "acute accent" 
>character, U+00B4, in the name "Gwich´in" 
>because that is what ISO 639 used.

You did WHAT? Oh, this is too depressing. The 
Gwich'in language uses a glottal stop, which 
could be represented by U+0027 APOSTROPHE or by 
U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, although the 
**correct** character to use is U+02BC MODIFIER 
LETTER APOSTROPHE (see 
http://www.languagegeek.com/dene/gwichin/gwichin.html). 
If ISO 639 is using U+00B4 ACUTE ACCENT this is 
some sort of bizarre fallback, and it is **not** 
what we should be using. We should use the 
correct character (as we do in ISO 15924), and if 
ISO 639 is using the wrong one, we should help 
them to correct it.

It is the codes (Nkoo, nqo) that are normative, not the descriptions.

>The "smart" apostrophe was used for the script 
>N'Ko because it appeared in ISO 15924. 
>Personally I think it is unfortunate that this 
>uncoordinated variety of apostrophes appears in 
>the registry, but after all, the spelling in the 
>Description field is not normative and can be 
>changed.

Gwich'in should be changed to Gwichʼin, surely.

>The decision is up to the list and the Reviewer, 
>but personally I would argue against adding 
>multiple Descriptions that differ only in a 
>minor typographical detail like this.

APOSTROPHE and RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK are a 
well-known typographical pairing and I don't 
suppose we need to have both.
-- 
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com