Apostrophe-like character in Arabic transliteration

MusicBrainz
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1

Does anybody know what the right unicode character to use for this apostrophe-like character is?

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Google translate transliterates it back to كيف إل لأمل, and I think the 'aa lines up with أ (U+0623 ARABIC LETTER ALEF WITH HAMZA ABOVE). Romanization of Arabic - Wikipedia shows a bunch of options for hamza. Ignoring ArabTex, Arabizi, and characters that don’t match what’s printed:

  • U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE ʼ, 5 columns
  • U+02BE MODIFIER LETTER RIGHT HALF RING ʾ, 3 columns
  • U+02BB MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA ʻ, 2 columns (in footnote)
  • U+02BD MODIFIER LETTER REVERSED COMMA ʽ, 2 columns (in footnote)
  • U+02C8 MODIFIER LETTER VERTICAL LINE ˈ, 1 column

If nobody has any better ideas, I guess I’ll use U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE because it looks like the one used by the most Latin transliteration systems.

P.S. I think Hebrew has something similar too. Style / Language / Hebrew - MusicBrainz just uses U+0027 APOSTROPHE though.

Edit: The release is Release “Trésors de la chanson judéo‐arabe” by Luc Cherki - MusicBrainz if anyone wants to look at the rest of the titles for context.

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I’m not an expert on this, but since this is a Latin transliteration, it makes sense to use a character that is common in the Latin script. Apostrophe seems the most obvious candidate.

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Do you mean U+0027 APOSTROPHE ’ or U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK ’? The former rarely makes sense except when there’s really nothing better. The latter makes sense for an apostrophe when used as punctuation, but I don’t think this is supposed to be punctuation?

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They are practically the same character, so you can just choose one. On my keyboard, the apostrophe is a little easier to type than single right quotation mark, so I use that one.

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Do a bit of a web search and see if you can track it back to source. But the keyboard apostrophe never harms to be used when you are not sure. Better than using a wrong one.

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Sure, I could, but Style / Miscellaneous - MusicBrainz recommends against it (but only recommends, not requires):

typographically-correct punctuation (such as ’ for the English apostrophe) is preferred

What kind of source do you mean? It looks like the track titles come from a 1977 album, so I don’t think there’s likely to be anything other than what’s printed on the releases to go by. The works are older and might have other sources, but that doesn’t seem all that relevant to track titles, especially for traditional works.

I’m pretty sure U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE is at least not wrong, it seems to be the generic character for an apostrophe when not used as punctuation. Given how much it looks like an apostrophe in the printed tracklists (both my later CD release and the original LP), and how it’s unlikely to be punctuation, I think that’s probably better than U+0027 APOSTROPHE.

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