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Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

erichgrunewald.com

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Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#41

Post by szszrk »

trzeci wrote: post #13

Which makes no sense IMHO is to use “” instead of "". But it could be my OCD also.

"" is a simplification that fits well in keyboard usage and ASCII, but not always real language practices. In my mother tongue we use a „quote”. Our characters in books speak starting from new line with a dash. But it's a different dash from simple minus sign we tend to use online, for simplicity. It's hard to actually use that on the Internet, but in books it's still the way.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#42

Post by eCa »

donatj wrote: post #20

I got in a heated debate about this with a technical writing instructor. Namely, I was ending a question with a quote along the lines of > Why did Jake believe the AI was “going to kill us all”? The instructor wanted me to put the question mark of the outer sentence within the quotation marks despite the quoted text not containing a question mark. > Why did Jake believe the AI was “going to kill us all?” I felt like…

Yes, this is the reason why, IMHO, the American way is objectively wrong.

Aesthetics is in the eye of the beholder, but a quotation style that enforces incorrect quotations is not good.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#43

Post by Tepix »

This is indeed annoying and illogical when learning english, especially because other languages get it right.

The french have a different speciality: punctuation marks that consist of two parts(i.e. ? ! ; :) are preceded by a space character. Also very irritating.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#44

Post by iggldiggl »

Y_Y wrote: post #28
trzeci wrote: post #13

Which makes no sense IMHO is to use “” instead of "". But it could be my OCD also.

It's all fun and games until you try to copy the "66 and 99"-style quotes from one place to another, or your ”helpful“ text editor automagically makes a mess of them. It's a pity no good ``asymmetric'' style ever really took off in English. I'm particularly fond of the French «chevrons», and relatedly, ¡Spanish exclamations! ⸘Why has not yet the opening interrobang received similarly wide adoption‽

I don't really like the dedicated interrobang character, because it loses the distinction between ?! and !?, which is probably rather subtle, but to my mind definitively there.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#45

Post by programmer_dude »

blitzar wrote: post #24
programmer_dude wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW the British style looks more aesthetically pleasing to me. The American style reminds me of inappropriately mixed brackets: [(]). Cringe.

> for the American style is aesthetics Why would you make a style choice to make something less aesthetically pleasing?

I wouldn't and I don't think I am. The American style is not aesthetically pleasing at all. I think you misread my comment or replied to me accidentally.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#46

Post by trzeci »

coldtea wrote: post #37
trzeci wrote: post #13

Which makes no sense IMHO is to use “” instead of "". But it could be my OCD also.

OCD would use the former as those are more proper typographical quotes. Straight edge quotes is a computer text thing, not a typographical convention for regular prose.

You're right. I used to programming quotes so much that every variation from it makes a pain. Especially mentioned below the automatic quote replacement by some text editor. Which does not make sense for me, when I paste a code snippet.

Another pain is when I see such code snippets on the web.

For the clarity, it's not only the US quotes I have a problem with. Other languages have also their corks:

- PL: „quote”

- PL: ‚quote’ (single variant)

- PL: ‘quote’ (british variant)

- FR: «quote»

- DE: »quote«

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#47

Post by nxpnsv »

runeks wrote: post #2

As a programmer, I’d prefer a combination of the two: Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”. as I think it’s weird that a punctuation mark inside a quote can end the sentence that contains the quote. I’d argue like this: in the above case there are two sentences, the quote and the sentence that contains the quote. Both need to be terminated with a period.

I logged in to write that it should be like this. Until the world changes, I use the British approach unless someone complains too much.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#48

Post by Y_Y »

iggldiggl wrote: post #44
Y_Y wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all fun and games until you try to copy the "66 and 99"-style quotes from one place to another, or your ”helpful“ text editor automagically makes a mess of them. It's a pity no good ``asymmetric'' style ever really took off in English. I'm particularly fond of the French «chevrons», and relatedly, ¡Spanish exclamations! ⸘Why has not yet the opening interrobang received similarly wide adoption‽

I don't really like the dedicated interrobang character, because it loses the distinction between ?! and !?, which is probably rather subtle, but to my mind definitively there.

I would argue that those two choices remain available to you, and that you can reach even finer levels of subtlety by using (or conspicuously not using) the interrobang.

(Just don't use "??!" because that's a trigraph for "|".)

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#49

Post by simiones »

I think the example sentence contains the worst corner-case of such a system. In general, the . at the end of sentence is the least necessary punctuation mark, and quotations of neutral statements should just always omit it.

For example, "this is how a neutral sentence should look like", I would say. I don't think "they saw a vase." looks good even in the middle of a sentence. However, "do I have a question?", or "I am exclaiming something!" do need their punctuation to make sense. Now, it's more ugly when you finish a neutral sentence a quote like "I am surprised!".

Of course, there will be cases, especially in literature, where the . will actually add something to the emphasis of a quote. For example, "I have said it all." could be used to emphasize the period itself - but in those cases, jarring punctuation like `.".` or `.",` would actually help to emphasize the importance of the period.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#50

Post by eurasiantiger »

maddyboo wrote: post #29
bloak wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”. Well, I don't really like that: it just doesn't look nice to me. I would suggest one of the following: Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus”. You've chosen not to quote the full stop. There's no law that says you have to include everything in the quotation, right? Dr Johnson kicked a lar…

> It’s a shame that the punctuation of human languages can’t be logical. s/the punctuation of //

Lojban is a human language, even if it is not a natural language.
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