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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

#51

Post by seszett »

trzeci wrote: post #46
coldtea wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

French quotes, unlike most others, must also be surrounded by spaces (like the other punctuation signs that are made of two parts) like this:

FR : « quote »

And all of the spaces except for the one after the ":" should be non-breaking spaces.

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

#52

Post by bambax »

OJFord wrote: post #39
coldtea wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at the same place as the quotes, under them What?

See po's comment providing SE links for doing it in tex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28536834

Ah, yes. Exactly that.

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

#53

Post by rom1v »

Tepix wrote: post #43

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.

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

Precision: a non-breaking space (unicode U+00A0) :)

LibreOffice or other word processing software automatically replace normal spaces by non-breaking spaces in that case.

But in text editors (like vim), we must do it manually (Ctrl+Shift+ua0 on Linux), typically when writing a French text in markdown, it's a bit irritating indeed.

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

#55

Post by alexanderskates »

bambax wrote: post #26

The reason this problem exists is because computers and font libraries don't have all the characters we need. The point or comma should be at the same place as the quotes, under them, not before or after.

And what of exclamation or question marks?

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

#57

Post by Udo_Schmitz »

trzeci wrote: post #46
coldtea wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

DE would be: „Zitat“. »Zitat« is also allowed. «Zitat» is mostly used in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Note missing spaces compared to French.

(Edited after correction from user bloak below)

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

#58

Post by Veen »

coldtea wrote: post #33
gerikson wrote: post #6

The linked article correctly uses "British" to denote the style of punctuation, I do not understand why OP decided to use "English" which implies that people in Scotland and Northern Ireland might punctuate differently.

> I do not understand why OP decided to use "English" which implies that people in Scotland and Northern Ireland might punctuate differently. Not sure about the author, but for several countries "English" is colloqualy used as a stand-in for British in general (and England for the UK), as those were the British they most commonly met.

It's best not to though, unless you want to annoy people from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Most English people will consider it a sign of ignorance too. Beyond that, the "colloquial" use is simply incorrect.

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

#59

Post by maybeOneDay »

KronisLV wrote: post #23
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…

> There's no law that says you have to include everything in the quotation, right? Oh, if only languages worked so consistently. DESCRIPTION_OF_WHAT_WAS_SAID: "$(DIRECT_QUOTE.)". Then again, in programming things don't always nest either, since sub shell calls have all sorts of oddities in regards to escape sequences. Has there ever been a case of anything nesting nicely, be it in languages, programming, or any other…

> Has there ever been a case of anything nesting nicely, be it in languages, programming, or any other medium of writing? Maybe XML? I'm not sure.

JSON?

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

#60

Post by bottled_poe »

bloak wrote: post #15
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.

> 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…

And what about when the quoted text is two sentences? Do we write a full stop for the first sentence, but not the second?
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