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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

#91

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

That's typical of older English typography as well.

Here in a book of classics printed in 1910:

https://archive.org/details/harvardclassics40elio/page/76/mo...

And in David Hume's Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753):

https://archive.org/details/essaysandtreati00humegoog/page/n...

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

#92

Post by xfz »

I think they messed up; the first sentences of each of the first two examples are identical apart from the reference.

> Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”[1] and

> Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”[3]

Second one should be:

Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus”.[3]

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

#93

Post by KronisLV »

maybeOneDay wrote: post #59
KronisLV wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Not quite, in practice you still occasionally stumble upon situations like these: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51974631/how-do-i-proper...

Or this: https://github.com/spaceghoul/json_deep_parse#example-usage-...

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

#94

Post by beckerdo »

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…

This brings up a point related to the double-period/redundancy discussion above.

In a slight adjustment of this example, what if the text were a question and the quotation were a statement. Would this be a good construct: Why did Jake believe "the AI was going to kill us all."?

Similarly you could have a text statement with a quoted question: Jake asked "would the AI kill us all?".

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

#95

Post by dspillett »

bambax wrote: post #21
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.

Strongly disagree. This is an abomination. Language and typography have to be elegant in addition to intelligible.

They don't have to be. They should be where-ever possible without affecting meaning or legibility.

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

#96

Post by dredmorbius »

user-the-name wrote: post #78

The only reason the "American style" exists is a technical workaround: It was easier to damage the expensive lead type used in print shops a century ago if the thin period character was used on the end of the line, rather than the thicker, sturdier quotation mark, so they were swapped as a cost-saving measure. None of this has been relevant for many decades, and people have forgotten the reason for this rule. It was…

Source?

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

#97

Post by bambax »

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 space should be an "espace fine" (espace is feminine in that context), meaning a smaller space (En Space) than the normal space (Em Space).

The En Space is non-breakable, but the normal non-breakable space is Em in length, and therefore improper.

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

#98

Post by bambax »

BossHamster wrote: post #65
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.

Not only is it irritating, it looks ugly as hell.

It doesn't look ugly at all if the space is of the correct length.

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

#100

Post by jeroenhd »

po wrote: post #18

The real answer is to use the British style but then combine the " and . into a ligature in the font so that it looks nicer like the American style. Simple! edit: Just searched and there are some people doing exactly this with negative kerning: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/369077/overlapping-q... https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/202799/how-can-i-typ...

Wow, I can't believe how much I now realize I want this to be the default. This whole situation feels like the result of a lack of computers unable to automatically place these "ligatures" and I've never considered how we should've ditched this restriction years ago.
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