Symbols for soft signs

[George Fowler]

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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George Fowler                                [Email] gfowler at indiana.edu
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