"LS" == Laurent Siebenmann writes:

 LS> Interesting.  Then maybe \CYRapos is the right solution? However,
 LS> that will place a stubborn road- block in the way of the
 LS> typographer who wants distinct lowercase and uppercase Cyrillic
 LS> apostrophes. Maybe there are none today (??). But what about the
 LS> furure?  The \CYRAPOS \cyrapos solution seems more standard and
 LS> more powerful (less limiting).

well, -- there are uppercase AND lowercase variants defined in unicode
for most letters, but there is NO uppercase/lowercase variant defined
for apostrophe (and palochka as well). so, it seems that there is NO
uppercase or lowercase form of apostrophe character, -- there is only
one invariant character.

there could be a distinction on the glyph level, where we could wish
to support more letter forms than the number of available characters,
but at the character level, there is only one apostrophe.

i do not know whether Ukrainian typesetting distinguishes upper- and
lowercase variants of apostrophe, -- we need some more info about this
(does anyone on the list know something about this?).

 LS> TeX can do better here in the Cyrillic world where TeX is young
 LS> and flexible.

surely, -- if we have a font (or font set) with all needed glyphs, we
could use it in TeX. it is possible to typeset texts in utf-8 encoding
using TeX (even not Omega).

the question is whether apostrophe should be supported in both cases
(upper and lower).

 LS> Is it not dangerous to allow even one letter in the Cyrillic
 LS> script fall out of the 100% control of Cyrillic users??

perhaps, i can agree here. it is strange however that unicode does not
define this _letter_ used in the cyrillic scripts in the cyrillic
area, like all the other cyrillic letters.

is it a `bug' in unicode, or is `MODIFIER LETTER' not considered as a
letter? is the apostrophe a letter or a `modifier letter'? what is the
difference?

if the `apos' character defined in unicode is NOT a 100%-letter, but
the apostrophe used in the Ukrainian language IS a 100%-letter, then
obviously the character `apos' is not correct to be referred to or
used in ukrainian texts.

are there any standards in the Ukraine that define and distinguish
apostrophe letter from the ascii apostrophe?

Best,
v.