Symbols for soft signs

[Alexey I. Fuchs]

Hi!

For years I've been talking to my friends with the UNIX ntalk program, on
the chats, I've been sending e-mails - all in russian. I cannot remember
any other representation of a soft sign than "'" symbol. I think that in
the light of persistency of common usage you should take this symbol.
Of course, sometimes russians use "b" to represent the soft sign, but it's
irony. (Hy, KAK TbI, KAKuE HOBOCTu?)

There is no problem with this sign, the apostrophy does not coincide with
any other sign representation, and the Gogol issue has almost nothing to
do with transliteration, from my point of view. English
versions of russian names must follow the pronouncation, not the original
orthography.

                                        Regards, Alexey



On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, George Fowler wrote:

> Greetings!
>
> I have been struggling for years with a good symbol for soft sign in
> transliterated Russian, and in the context of the discussion of
> SEEJ's transliteration policy, I am prompted to toss this one out for
> discussion.
>
> SEEJ appears to use a curly apostrophe nowadays for soft sign (I went
> leafing through the newly mailed issue and found a number of
> examples). The two transliteration tables at the back of each issue
> do not, however, license this usage, but rather call for something
> like a prime symbol. Obviously it is better to use a distinct symbol
> whenever possible, since the functions of an apostrophe in English
> text and a soft sign in transliterated Russian text have nothing to
> do with each other. (One could construct the opposite argument, of
> course: since they are contextually distinct, it doesn't matter if
> you use the same symbol, as no confusion will ever arise.) (Of
> course, there is the absurd dilemma of things like "Gogol''s life and
> works", with both symbols juxtaposed, but the SEEJ approach is to
> leave off the soft sign on Gogol in English, probably for this very
> reason.)
>
> My question to SEELangs subscribers is, what symbols do you use if
> you want this to look as "right" as possible in computer word
> processing? I am a Mac user, and I have tried the following variants:
>
> 1. Free-standing, non-zero-width acute accent (Shift-Option-E in most
> standard fonts). This is pitched too far forward and takes up too
> much space.
>
> 2. Italicized straight apostrophe, using italics to achieve a slight
> lean to the right. This can work, though sometimes it leaves too much
> space in a non-italicized word; its acceptability depends upon the
> font, as in some fonts it leans farther than in others.
>
> 3. The "prime" symbol from the Symbol font. This leans perhaps still
> a bit more than the symbol in the SEEJ transliteration table, but it
> looks okay in most text. The worst problem is when there is a tall
> letter to the left and a short one to the right, e.g., in a word like
> global'nyj, especially when it is italicized, because the elevated
> right edge of the soft sign mark appears too far from the left edge
> of the n. A solution is to kern the text together, but this is
> difficult in a word processing program, and requires a dedicated page
> layout program. Len', I say!
>
> Ideal for my purposes would be a mark which leans less than the
> Symbol prime mark, but still leans, and which has an extremely narrow
> character field so that it doesn't create a visual space between the
> adjacent letters. Any suggestions? I would be interested in Windows
> solutions as well.
>
> George Fowler
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