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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

#111

Post by open-source-ux »

ponco wrote: post #54

I genuinely love how American, Australian, and British, English all differ in these subtle ways. I think another example that gets me is: `e.g.` vs `e.g.,` MS Word favours the `e.g.,` which I never see in Australian English.

There are so many small differences between English language flavours, it's fascinating.

Going off on a tangent, here's a random example...

The way brackets/parentheses are referred to in American English vs British English is different.

In the US:

() = parentheses

[] = brackets

{} = braces (or curly braces)

= angle brackets

In the UK:

() = brackets (or 'round brackets')

[] = square brackets

{} = curly brackets

= angle brackets (or angled brackets)

I prefer the UK version because it is simpler and feels logical. Plus, the word 'parentheses' is a mouthful :-)

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

#112

Post by mdp2021 »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #106
thaumasiotes wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terminating the quoted sentence with a period is redundant, since the closing quotation mark also terminates it.

So would you suggest that it would make sense to never have punctuation before a quotation mark?

Only when necessary.

E.g.: '«Are you joking?!», he said. The other replied, «I'm not joking at all». They went on'.

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

#114

Post by Loic »

My first association: https://xkcd.com/541/

This is very emotional because we start when being 6 and as such, for many years, you are exposed to only one way to quote or put spaces around punctuation.

I am French, living in Germany and working in English 50% of the time. It is interesting that it is only after maybe 15 years outside of France that now my feeling for what is the right way in one language matches the rules. For example:

    - How do you do?
    - Comment allez-vous ?
Notice the space before the question mark in French. For me, now, it feels right for both, for a long time this was not the case.

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

#115

Post by ivan_gammel »

OskarS wrote: post #69
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why it is redundant. There is no reason to assume that the quoted sentence ends the quoting sentence. Imagine this being the last thing you see on a page. Without turning the page, there would be no way of knowing whether the quoting sentence is complete. But these things are just conventions. It's futile to demand any kind of logic or consistency.

This is the kind of thing that really annoy programmers (because in programming languages, you can never omit things like this), but everyone else is perfectly fine with. As a programmer though, it certainly annoys me!

In fact in some programming languages you can (or should) omit things like this. E.g. pascal does not require or explicitly forbids semicolon before end keyword.

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

#116

Post by sbuk »

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…

Typographically, the first comma is redundant, as it's implied in the break;

"On the other hand", she said, "we could wait 'til dark".

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

#117

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #67
Veen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A footnote in the article addresses this: "More logical still would be to have two periods, one marking the end of the quoted sentence and the other the end of the top-level sentence. But that would be redundant and also look ugly." I tend to agree with the author. While it's logically consistent, it's typographically redundant. There's no need to end a sentence with a full stop, a quotation mark, another full stop,…

I don't see why it is redundant. There is no reason to assume that the quoted sentence ends the quoting sentence. Imagine this being the last thing you see on a page. Without turning the page, there would be no way of knowing whether the quoting sentence is complete. But these things are just conventions. It's futile to demand any kind of logic or consistency.

It's not the only element of style that may seem illogical, there are many more. Off the top of my head:

* Nested parentheses. (In theory, you could use any level needed (provided that they make sense), but in practice, they're scoffed at.) It is similar with quotes, for the same reasons: limited readability - although here you can at least juggle with single, double and French quotes, depending on the language and style guide used.

* Repetitions: unless used as a stylistic device (in poetry, advertising, etc.), your editors will try to modify repeated words, trying to find synonyms. In technical writing, it is an abomination, and competent editors know very well they must not touch any specific terms, no matter how often repeated, as they have very precise meaning.

But in general, the rules present in style guides are meant to ensure consistency and uniform reading experience, so that the reader is not distracted by form and can concentrate on the meaning, so they are a good thing as long as people are aware these are just arbitrary rules separate from spelling and grammar.

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

#118

Post by ranko »

macdice wrote: post #70

Another stupid detail like this that immediately tells you that text is from America is the capitalisation of every word in a title. Compare the front page of the NY Times with the front pages from any other English speaking country and you see the contrast. I didn't check, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Canadians go both ways at random ;-)

Book titles in British English tend to be title case (capitalise most words, apart from "a", "the", etc), but newspaper headlines are usually sentence case apart from tabloid front pages, which are all caps and have their own language ("It's the Sun wot won it", for example).

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

#119

Post by thaumasiotes »

john-aj wrote: post #86
rozab wrote: post #61

I was typing out an explanation/justification to the effect that when speaking aloud, the punctuation at the end of the sentence is 'heard' in the last word, even if the word is quoted. We insert a pause before the start of the quote to indicate it was direct, but there isn't a way of indicating whether, say, a question mark belongs inside or outside the quotation. But then I sounded out some examples in my head and…

Also, aren't questions marked primarily by word order rather than intonation in English?

There are several kinds of questions.

The intonation that people think of as characterizing questions is actually specific to yes/no questions. It can be the only feature that marks the sentence as interrogative: "You know him?" is a valid sentence, and it is distinct from the indicative "You know him."

There are also what I think of as "question word" questions, and you might think of as "fill in the blank" questions: "Why are you here?"

These do not necessarily have the intonation that applies to yes/no questions. Like yes/no questions, they are characterized by subject-auxiliary inversion (the word order constraint you mention), and also like yes/no questions, that inversion is not guaranteed to be present in a question of this type: "Who sent you?"

(Note that inversion is possible for "You know him?" ("Do you know him?") and impossible for "Who sent you?"; these are different phenomena.)

I would argue that the yes/no question is primarily marked by intonation and the question-word question is primarily marked by the presence of a question word. Word order is affected in both cases, but not the primary indicator of what's going on. (Compare "He said what to the king?" - again, inversion is possible here ("What did he say to the king?"), but not required. In this case, the inverted version of the question is unmarked (normal), and the uninverted version suggests that the speaker wishes to place a special emphasis on something.)

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

#120

Post by Tainnor »

> There is no reason that there should be two different approaches to punctuation in the English language.

That's the typical answer a programmer would give. A linguist, or really any kind of sociologist, would rather say:

> There is no reason that there should be a single approach to punctuation in the English language.

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