TeX definitely distinguishes between -, -- and --- in text mode (hyphen, en dash, em dash); there are packages for language-specific quotes and hyphenation rule

TeX definitely distinguishes between -, -- and --- in text mode (hyphen, en dash, em dash); there are packages for language-specific quotes and hyphenation rules so there may be something out there that does this - ctan/smartmn specifically seems to be dealing with this kind of thing. Mind you, TeX also allows pretty arbitrary remapping of symbols.