Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 9ffb6ce 5/5: Quoting fixes in lisp/international and lisp/leim

[Paul Eggert]

On 09/02/2015 10:43 AM, David Kastrup wrote:
> ' is an_apostrophe_.  Changing it to an open single quote
> mark in words like "don't" is utterly wrong

I assume you meant “close single quote” not “open single quote”. (It 
would indeed be utterly wrong to transliterate apostrophe to open single 
quote, but Emacs doesn’t do that.)

The initial version of the quote-tranformation code behaved as you 
suggested, and left isolated apostrophes alone.  But Dmitry pointed out 
that apostrophe in English is represented by right single quotation mark 
as standard typographic practice in fonts with directed quotes, so I 
changed Emacs to translate all non-escaped apostrophes.  In practice 
most isolated apostrophes in docstrings and diagnostics are intended to 
be English apostrophes, so it seemed appropriate to transliterate them 
as in English, of course with an escape hatch for those intended to be 
Elisp apostrophes.

For more about common practice with apostrophes in natural-language 
text, please see <http://www.languagegeek.com/typography/apostrophes.html>.