which apostrophe should i use for possessive symbol?
U+0027 Apostrophe
’
my mother's jeans
U+2032 Prime
′
my mother′s jeans
U+2019 Right Single Quotation Mark
’
my mother’s jeans
U+FF07 Full width Apostrophe
＇
my mother＇s jeans
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It happens U+2019 is used a lot (and recommended by Unicode committee).
But there’s an interesting discussion (to add some confusion) at Which Unicode character should represent the English apostrophe? (And why the Unicode committee is very wrong.) | Tedʼs Blog
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I’ll also leave User:Jacobbrett/English Punctuation Guide - MusicBrainz Wiki here, since I’ve found it helpful.
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A few weeks ago, I noticed a convenient menu in Windows, press Win+; and a virtual keyboard will popup.
You are on a smiley tab, but in the third tab, you can find most useful topographic characters (curly single and double quotes, en and em dashes, etc.).
Never understood the use of the U+2019 other than as an end quotation mark. It’s not on most keyboards so you have to do special things, many people don’t know the difference, the difference is hard to see in most fonts, and most regexp implementations see “don’t” as two words. The apostrophe can be used for an end quotation mark but it does not mean it is one. It is probably used because it is so easy to type. And it does not mean the other way around is proper: why use an end quotation mark for an apostrophe? For a database like MB (and I think most usages) the apostrophe just makes more sense. Or to turn it around, I do not see any sense in using the U+2019. I don’t get the reason behind the Unicode Committee for stating U+2019 is the preferred way of using an apostrophe. Makes absolutely no sense to me. And I think to 99% of people who use keyboards.
On most Linux machines you can use the Compose key: compose + > and then '. That means I have to press Compose plus Shift plus > and then type, yes, apostrophe. In English the apostrophe happens a lot. And there is an apostrophe key on the keyboard.
Nope, it is still not making sense to use U+2019.
I was using Linux until my PC broke.
What keyboard key is the compose key?
Is it Win? Is it Alt Gr?
You mean the typewriter (straight) apostrophe? Yes, it’s present on all keyboards, worldwide.
But notice that if books and newspapers would use this, it would not look good.
Some prints (CD, books, …) do use typewriter apostrophe, it does happen. They look unprofessional and cheap.
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It’s the right Alt, sometimes marked as Alt Gr.
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But what is the purpose of MB? Not to be printed in a book or on CD. Depending on the font an apostrophe can look good. It looks weird when an apostrophe is used as en quotation mark. But in my opinion, using the end quotation mark instead of an apostrophe looks wrong as well.
By the way, on my Windows laptop (work forces me to use Windows) I installed a tool called WinCompose. It mimics the Compose key from Linux. Saves a lot of typing.
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It cannot look wrong, because apostrophes in texts should be curly like this.
We have learned to write this way since childhood.
But maybe it feels wrong to you, just because of its name (RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK instead of APOSTROPHE).
But that’s a font thing, how to display a character. There have been many ways to write the apostrophe (Apostrophe - Wikipedia) and many of those are down to habit and style. I was not taught to make it curly. My grandmother disliked anything that was not cursive because that was how she was taught to write. The character itself is still an apostrophe. There must be fonts that show the apostrophe more curly. If you want to change how it looks, use a different font.
That has something to do with it, of course. That was the Unicode Committee’s decision. But they also made the decision to have a character called APOSTROPHE.
Somewhere, someone made the decision they prefer that what used to be an apostrophe should now be a right single quotation mark.
I am not convinced. The only plus for using U+2019 is one committee’s preference. All other arguments are votes for the plain apostrophe.
There is in some pre-Unicode Japanese fonts, IIRC, that display them as curly apostrophes.
But then it’s wrong because you cannot guess what had in mind the user who typed the typewriter apostrophe (U+0027 APOSTROPHE), you cannot guess for sure if it should be rendered as a left single quote or a right single quote / apostrophe.
On the other hand, if you need typewriter apostrophe for some reasons, you can automatically search all left and right curly quotes and replace them by typewriter.
It’s more that the name U+0027 APOSTROPHE is badly chosen, they should have given this character an ambiguous name like they did for U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, something like U+0027 SINGLE QUOTATION MARK - APOSTROPHE.
But they certainly had many things to cope with and oversought this, and now it’s named like this.
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No matter how it looks, the character in “don’t” or “supper’s ready” is an apostrophe and the keyboard has an apostrophe and 99.9% of the world accepts the keyboard apostrophe as an actual apostrophe and types it that way. It is a correct way and it is the easiest way and most common way.
If I see Supper’s Ready (apostrophe) and Supper’s Ready (U+2109) and the system says they are different but I don’t see it, I regard that as a flaw in the system, not in the way I type.
Therefore, in my opinion it is a bad choice to use a different character that is harder to type and hardly anybody recognises as something differently.
If it is only for looks, why not replace it only in the UI? Or preferably let the user decide if they want to replace ’ with ’ when they are watching the site.
Conversations about apostrophe’s using this forum’s software’s always funny as the forum acts like a word processor and swaps the keyboar’ds apostrophe’s out to the unicode’s version. 
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Well, computer keyboards were mainly designed by US/UK people.
And I think they would have been very different if it wasn’t the case.
For example, French keyboard AZERTY is derived from QWERTY keyboard with some swapped keys, but most characters on it aren’t really often used in French (like []or £, which are easy to find and type on standard AZERTY keyboard), but the very unique character œ which is mandatory in words like cœur (heart) isn’t even printed on many French keyboards; to the point many French people write coeur instead).
Same goes for many characters in many languages. So, that’s a fact many people use a single quote for apostrophe because of the easy access provided by computer keyboards, but in typography those are clearly two different characters.
It’s quite challenging to define the correct character to use, it often changed over the time, the area, etc. See for example Quotation mark - Wikipedia
In French, we use a lot of different quotation marks, but almost never straight ones (and those are often replaced on the fly by software).
Having a definitive position on whether one character is the right one to use seems pretty hard to me as it depends on many parameters (time, space, context, language, habits, writing means, etc.).
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I understand and agree. I work with Swedish keyboards now so the åëö are actual keys. Problem is they reworked most (){},./<>? as well so quite hard to get used to.
True. But this is about the apostrophe, which is on almost all of the keyboards in this world, even Chinese keyboards from the look of it. The key was made for the apostrophe which was very common in many languages, even English, which was the basis for the US and US Intl keyboard layout.
With everything we have, using that key, which most of the world will be using, it just makes no sense at all to me to let people type in a character that is not on any keyboard. We have a database here, not a literary magazine, where I would definitely have a nice-looking text in mind. Easy of entry etc. is more important here.
You would have seen the difference if Discourse forum did not replace your typewriter apostrophe by the typographic apostrophe (U+2019).
You see! Discourse, Word, etc. Many softwares also think typographic apostrophe (U+2019) is more appropriate, not only MB.
I don’t agree, it would mean that for French titles we would have meant typos like coeur and choeur (ach, how it hurts my eyes), instead of cœur chœur.
We should not be limited by our keyboards.
If you can’t type appropriate characters, no problem.
But everyone is encouraged to fix them:
Style / Miscellaneous - MusicBrainz
Use of basic ASCII punctuation characters such as
'and"is allowed, but typographically-correct punctuation (such as’for the English apostrophe) is preferred.
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You are missing an important fact, the character you get when you press this common key is very dependent on the context (software, language, character set used).
Even on the same computer, two applications may not produced the same encoded character.
For example, if you are editing with a programing text editor it will very likely produce an English single quote (heavily used in coding). But if you’re editing with a Unicode-compatible word processor, it will likely be a typographic apostrophe of some sort, with an encoding that may vary based on the program, OS, settings.
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