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Interrobang

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Re: Interrobang

#91

Post by carapace »

crazygringo wrote: post #86

My problem with the interrobang, besides the fact it's unnecessary ("?!" does just fine, the same way we don't need to replace "th" with "θ"), is that it's so damned ugly and hard to distinguish . The counter [1] -- the open space between the vertical bar and the question mark curve -- is just too cramped ("‽"), so it's aesthetically unbalanced at large sizes, and just looks like a question mark with an accidental sm…

FWIW, Replacing "th" with "θ" would really be a "re-placement": Theta and the "voiced dental fricative"[1] were smeared together in Old English long ago.[2]

I.e. "there" and "theater" are two different "th"'s.[3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_fricative

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th_(digraph)#Voiced_fricative_...

[3] English speakers: if you pay attention to how you speak those two words you'll notice that your tongue is doing different things to make those two "th" sounds. This is a weird "archaeo-linguistic" holdover in your "motor-culture". In a certain sense, "you" always knew this but didn't know you knew.

Re: Interrobang

#92

Post by wintermutesGhst »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #52
falcor84 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not convinced by reason #1 because words are distinct even in speech. No matter how fast or continuous your speech when you say, "The dog jumped", everyone will agree that "dog" is a distinct thing, even if you're illiterate. Segmenting words is actually a quite complex cognitive task that takes a while to acquire, usually considered in the framework of statistical learning[0]. Another aspect here is that the co…

If you listen to people speaking in a language you do not understand it can be _very_ hard to pick out the space between individual words. When learning a language your brain learns to artificially break up the almost continuous stream of sound into distinct words.

I notice this on occasion when people are speaking a language I do understand, but I miss a syllable or two when they begin speaking. The rest of their speech might as well be another language as it all runs together incomprehensibly. I cannot parse the whole sentence after missing the prompt at the beginning, and cannot even separate where the words split.

Re: Interrobang

#93

Post by function_seven »

Angostura wrote: post #51
function_seven wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you nailed it. More than half of the em dashes and en dashes I type are a result of Word correcting a pair of hyphens in a row. I write "Foo--but not bar" and it renders “Foo—but not bar”. There are no curly quotes on my keyboard either, but any decently professional typesetting uses them of course.

do you really want an em-dash there? they are typically used in sentences to introduce a strong break in a parethetical clause, but without using parentheses :)

Is this the grammar equivalent of people misreading the contrived code snippet—often shortened to focus the reader on the concept being discussed (like on StackOverflow)—for the real thing?

There, nested both types. I think that works.

Re: Interrobang

#94

Post by TremendousJudge »

ggambetta wrote: post #49
BjoernKW wrote: post #36

¡Why not go for the Spanish option? Indeed, there's an inverted variant: ⸘Do Spanish speakers actually use that‽

We do use inverted opening marks, but I've never seen mismatched opening and closing marks (until your comment!). Not sure if that's what you were asking, though.

Also, if I were to use mismatched opening and closing marks, I'd invert the order, question mark first and bang later

Re: Interrobang

#95

Post by kazinator »

lostlogin wrote: post #30
kazinator wrote: post #12

> Sometimes, this never-ending string of letters would execute what was called an ox-turn, first reading left to right, then switching to read back from right to left. What a fail! Perfect opportunity missed to use the word "boustrophedon": and in the matching historic context, too.

Having long palindromes would be super helpful in these awful documents.

Could be. Note that the Greeks actually mirrored the individual letters in the lines going the other way. So there is no ambiguity, as long as a line contains some asymmetric characters; you know when your eyes have landed on a right-left line, regardless of palindromes and such.

Re: Interrobang

#96

Post by lemoncucumber »

carapace wrote: post #91
crazygringo wrote: post #86

My problem with the interrobang, besides the fact it's unnecessary ("?!" does just fine, the same way we don't need to replace "th" with "θ"), is that it's so damned ugly and hard to distinguish . The counter [1] -- the open space between the vertical bar and the question mark curve -- is just too cramped ("‽"), so it's aesthetically unbalanced at large sizes, and just looks like a question mark with an accidental sm…

FWIW, Replacing "th" with "θ" would really be a "re-placement": Theta and the "voiced dental fricative"[1] were smeared together in Old English long ago.[2] I.e. "there" and "theater" are two different "th"'s.[3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_fricative [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th_(digraph)#Voiced_fricative_... [3] English speakers: if you pay attention to how you speak those two words you'l…

Similarly, there's no letter for the voiced palato-alveolar fricative in English (and as I recall it's actually one of the newest sounds that is part of English). It's the voiced version of the "sh" sound -- an example is the "si" part of "vision".

Re: Interrobang

#97

Post by macintux »

pagutierrezn wrote: post #15

Chess annotation symbols for moves https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_annotation_symbols ?? (Blunder) ? (Mistake) ?! (Dubious move) !? (Interesting move) ! (Good move) ‼ (Brilliant move)

I was just thinking that combining them took away my ability to express different emotions depending on which came first, but my use is the opposite of those.

To me, the first one is the immediate response, so a dubious move might look exciting at first but then you realize its problematic aspect, so !? would be the sequence.

Re: Interrobang

#98

Post by shkkmo »

computator wrote: post #83
hannasanarion wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not convinced by reason #1 because words are distinct even in speech. No matter how fast or continuous your speech when you say, "The dog jumped", everyone will agree that "dog" is a distinct thing, even if you're illiterate. It seems quite logical to separate "dog" from the words before and after when you write. Clearly you've never tried to learn a second language? Word segmentation is a very difficult task f…

Since several people made the same point about word segmentation, I obviously didn't express myself very well. What I was trying to say is that, assuming you speak the language , you will recognize "dog" a separate ‘ thing’ in a sentence. If I point to a German Shepherd asking what that is, anyone who speaks English can reply "dog". It can't be shorter; it could be longer but then you're adding information ("big dog"…

Well, if showing the boundaries doesn't matter for native speakers in spoken language, why would it be natural to assume that it is needed in written language?

Re: Interrobang

#99

Post by l9k »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #57
computator wrote: post #40

> For thousands of years, in some written languages, there was no space between words. People were expected figure out sentences and clauses while reading aloud. Really?! Addingspacesbetweenwordsseemslikeanobviousthingtodo. According to Wikipedia, spaces weren't added because: (1) Free form of speech is so continuous, adding inaudible spaces to manuscripts would have been considered illogical. (2) At a time when ink…

I'm not terrible at French and still struggle sometimes to discern the word breaks. Malapropisms in my native English can arise from that too. Learning a new language it can be v. hard to distinguish word breaks - our brain fills them in when we know a language, which is why it's hard to imagine that people might not agree that "dog" is separate. Try saying "Hangdogears". Is it "hangdog ears" is it "hang dog ears" is…

For non-native speakers, it's particularly difficult to pronounce and/or understand English composed word when they are "joined" with the same consonant (eg: newsstand, withhold, ...)

Re: Interrobang

#100

Post by shemtay »

carapace wrote: post #91
crazygringo wrote: post #86

My problem with the interrobang, besides the fact it's unnecessary ("?!" does just fine, the same way we don't need to replace "th" with "θ"), is that it's so damned ugly and hard to distinguish . The counter [1] -- the open space between the vertical bar and the question mark curve -- is just too cramped ("‽"), so it's aesthetically unbalanced at large sizes, and just looks like a question mark with an accidental sm…

FWIW, Replacing "th" with "θ" would really be a "re-placement": Theta and the "voiced dental fricative"[1] were smeared together in Old English long ago.[2] I.e. "there" and "theater" are two different "th"'s.[3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_fricative [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th_(digraph)#Voiced_fricative_... [3] English speakers: if you pay attention to how you speak those two words you'l…

I can't think of any pair of English words that are distinguished by a voiced vs unvoiced dental fricative at the same location, c.f. 'sue' and 'zoo'.

Does any such pair exist?

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