Quite aside from the ambiguity of problems of
apostrophes, the
difficulty of writing curved single quotes has been mentioned. Here's
how a totally different, unrelated wiki program could work:
//italics//
**bold**
' - straight apostrophe
'single quotes''
'''backwards single quotes'''
In other words, ' is rendered like the current apostrophe, and '' is a
curved apostrophe that leans either way depending on what text is
immediately adjacent. And for those cases where you want the quotes to
lean the *other* way, ''' just does the opposite of whatever '' does.
There has to be a better way, surely. Anything using the same
character for different things is going to run into trouble...
I guess an alternative could use the
"backquote":
Until you actually want to use a backquote. Doesn't happen very often
in English, but does it get used in other languages?