Trope-a-Day: Decorative Apostrophe

Alistair Young

Sep 21, 2012

Decorative Apostrophe: They’re not decorative. Nor are the other accents. The acute indicates a long vowel; the diaeresis indicates, as it does in other languages, that two vowels are pronounced separately, and an apostrophe, found trailing a vowel with a diaeresis, indicates that that vowel is both long and pronounced separately, except that my current software doesn’t let me put both an acute and a diaeresis on the same letter. (Also, “!” is pronounced <click>.)

Something which I need to solve before I get to publishing anything that uses one of those words, belike.

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