Typing in Welsh (apostrophes)

Welsh General / Questions
#1

This is, I admit, a niche question, but…

Most word processors[1] have a ‘smart quotes’ feature which automatically produces the right symbol for open and close double and single quotes and apostrophes. (“double”, ‘single’).

The English version occasionally gets it wrong – it will produce ‘Cause I said so rather than ’Cause… but that doesn’t happen very often in English.

But in Welsh you have open abbreviations all over the place – ’na, ’ma, ’sti etc, so it becomes irritating fairly quickly to have to type the correct version in manually.

Is there a clever way of avoiding this problem (short of setting your computer locale to Welsh, which I’m not up to yet…), or do you just ignore it?

(I did say it was fairly niche…)

Thanks!

[1] I’m on a Mac, where this sort of thing is usually done at a system level, so it affects all text programs except possibly Word, which I don’t use.

1 Like
#2

Personally… this!

2 Likes
#3

I suspect that’s the sensible option!

#4

If I’ve got smart quotes, rather than invariable straight ones, I’ll normally type two in a row so that the device treats them as opening and closing, and then delete the opening one before typing the word. I think that usually works.

1 Like
#5

If you’re on a Mac, then cmd-shift-] will give you ’, which is possibly a bit quicker, if you remember to do it (which I normally don’t…).

I’ve tried Text Replacements, but can’t get it to work.

#6

I tried a test in Pages. I put a random letter before the apostrophe then deleted it after typing the word. It retained the correct character.

1 Like
#7

Thanks – that’s interesting. I hadn’t tried that.

It’s still another step you have to remember to do (or ignore, as @siaronjames says :wink:) though. You can always search and replace afterwards, of course, but I’ll probably try to remember to use the cmd-shift-] shortcut, now I’ve found out what it is.

1 Like
#8

As a former editor and proofreader, these do my nut in!! I particularly can’t bear it when they appear on professionally typeset material…

Unfortunately, setting one’s language to Welsh on Microsoft or Apple doesn’t help, as it doesn’t pick up on them. @RichardBuck’s workaround is a good one, but slightly annoying to be doing all the time.

What I really need to get round to doing is turning “smart quotes” off on my Word package. There are instructions here: Smart quotes in Word and PowerPoint - Microsoft Support

(My organisation subscribes to Office 365, so we’ve always got the most up to date version of the software … which invariably doesn’t match the helpful online instructions … and mine’s in Welsh … But I think I need to get round to working out how to do it, and then telling the rest of the organisation how to do it so that everybody stops with the opening quote marks!)

1 Like
#9

I’m not a professional proofreader, but I do notice this sort of thing (otherwise I wouldn’t have been bothered enough to ask the question in the first place, of course…)

Given that getting the companies to change their algorithms isn’t likely to happen so, I’ve decided the only viable way is to learn the keyboard shortcuts.

That’s trivially easy on a Mac, because the shortcuts are built in to both the English and the Welsh keyboards: opt-] for ‘ (open single quote) and shift-opt-] for ’ (close single quote).

As you only need this for the exceptions (’ma, ’na, etc), you only really need to learn the second one, and let the ‘smart’ quote transformation worry about the rest of them.

Unfortunately, Windows, as usual, makes this sort of thing much harder – their keyboard handling hasn’t really improved since the 1980s. The ‘official’ way to type ’ is to hold down the Alt-Key and type 01246.

Obviously, that’s not feasible on a longterm basis, so some people use a free program called AutoHotkey, which allows you to set a shortcut which will work in any program, so that you can type, say alt-shift-] just as you would on the Mac.

AutoHotkey is available here: AutoHotkey. It does a lot more than just simple substitutions, but the basics are fairly easy, if I remember rightly.

I used it a year or two ago and had shortcuts for em- and en-dashes, for example, and it worked well. It’s certainly a lot less fuss than any of the workarounds, for me anyway.

1 Like
#10

I worked on Windows for years, and had a whole array of hotkeys set up on my system (just under Windows’ own settings rather than on a plug-in) as well as a bunch of autoreplace options like turning spaced hyphens into spaced en-rules. And then I went to Mac, and promptly forgot all about them. Then after many happy years with my iMac (sadly missed, RIP) I gave up being freelance, went back into the workplace, and had to learn how to deal with Windows all over again (not having a choice in the matter).

I’ve just set my Windows options to stop turning quotes & apostrophes into smart quotes, so we’ll see how that goes…

1 Like
#11

I sympathise…

I don’t like using the autocorrect ‘smart’ dashes because they assume that you always want an em-dash when you type two dashes. So people end up having space-em-space, which is a crime against nature, instead of space-en-space (UK) or nospace-em-nospace (US and/or UK). So I prefer to type them in by hand (opt-_ for en, shift-opt-_ for em).

They could at least have two dashes = en-dash, three = em-dash, but Word once again assumes that everybody types in American.

1 Like
#12

I’m actually on Linux and just checked my keyboard mapping - if I can be bothered to remember it, I can go straight to the right thing with Shift-altR-B. If I can be even more bothered I expect I can go under the hood and edit that mapping, but I don’t think I’ll be doing it any time soon!

1 Like
#13

I’m on a phone. My Samsung keyboard has a simple short vertical line as the apostrophe or single quotation mark… however, when I check how the forum will display what I’ve typed, I see it has been replaced with a slanted version. I haven’t the foggiest how to control it.
If I want to write 'ma, 'na, ‘sti what happens? The first two are the symbol I actually typed, but not the third. I wonder why?
My television display has a limited character set. I first noticed with an episode description of Pobol y Cwm, and now I’m seeing it everywhere. It receives input obviously written with the slanted single quotes. It chooses that basic unslanted single quotation mark for the close of a quote, but the opening quote… it knows a symbol that slants that direction! The back tick!
So anything in quotes gets rendered as `quote’ (well, almost; the forum got clever with the closing quote again) which looks rather silly.
Tech trying to be clever when it is in fact not clever enough to pull it off!
I think the only way to stay sane is to ignore the whole situation. (I hate it. I am going to be noticing every. single. time. it happens now.)
This seems related to the joke that if you hate someone, you should teach him to recognise bad kerning.

1 Like
#14

`Words…’ used to be the way you had to input proper quotes into LaTeX text editors in the old days, if you want proper curly quotes and apostrophes.

Sorry about introducing you to Typographical Terror…

1 Like
#15

Forum strikes again - I think you meant (by the power of backslash!):
`Words… '
or possibly
``Words… ' '
Joy.

1 Like
#16

“By the power of backslash”?

#17

If you don’t want a computer/the forum to reinterpret what you type, you can put a \ backslash before the offending character (and then use the preview to check if it works). On my phone, if I type ', the forum shows ’ ; but if I type \', you just see the ' that I wanted you to see. (Except, of course, that to type this so that you could see what I meant, and put bits in bold, I actually had even more invisible extra characters all over the shop.)

2 Likes
#18

Ah, I see what you mean – the closing stupid quote. Yes, indeed!

I was concentrating on the backtick and missed the closing quote getting stupified.

1 Like
#19

:heart_eyes:

Many fond (?) memories of setting our student music calendar in LaTeX, must be … almost 40 years ago now? (eek!!)

2 Likes
#20

I’m just enough behind that curve that my introduction to LaTeX came via the WYSIWYM of LyX (“what you see is what you mean” - a kind of GUI for LaTeX).
…Aaand on a side note, this thread has prompted me to do enough digging to figure out how to add š and ḫ to my keyboard on both my laptops, for reasons probably best left unsaid. Mutter mumble still trying to learn Hittite mumble…

2 Likes