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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

#131

Post by cygx »

Udo_Schmitz wrote: post #57
trzeci wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

DE would be: „Zitat“

I thought you made another mistake here, but it turns out it's just my font that is broken. For anyone else who might have this problem: The closing marks are supposed to go from bottom left to top right, whereas they are displayed going from top left to bottom right :(

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

#132

Post by montroser »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #115
OskarS wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See also automatic semicolon insertion in JavaScript, and conditional permission to omit closing

tags in HTML.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/grouping-content.html...

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

#133

Post by kdeldycke »

I tried to implement some linting rules for quotation mark and punctuation once. Took me way too much time and effort. It's mostly trial and error but good enough I guess to highlight the most blatant abuses.

Anyway, here is the code: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome-lint/pull/101/files

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

#134

Post by currysausage »

bambax wrote: post #97
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.

Note that em (current point size) and en (½ em) spaces are both wider than the regular space character (typically ¼ em). An espace fine insécable (narrow no-break space) is even smaller, usually as small as a Unicode thin space (⅕ or ⅙ em): https://jkorpela.fi/chars/spaces.html

Word, in French mode, inserts regular no-break spaces where narrow no-break spaces would be appropriate. I find this style rather irritating, but then again, I don’t read nearly enough French to get accustomed to it.

However, I do agree strongly with the late Jan Tschichold, who recommended thin spaces before question marks, exclamation marks, colons, and semicolons for other languages, too: https://www.courses.psu.edu/art/art101_jxm22/tschichold.html...

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

#135

Post by afarviral »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #80
bujak300 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a quote is incomplete and a meaningful part is omitted there are other typographical conventions to indicate that, like a double period .. for example

>If a quote is incomplete and a meaningful part is omitted there are other typographical conventions to indicate that, like a double period .. for example Yes, but what I'm talking about is the reverse situation. How would you know whether or not the quoting (outer) sentence is complete? You cannot logically infer that from the quoted (inner) sentence, which is why I'm saying that the second period is not redudant.

you would assume its complete in the absence of a double period. For instance, he said "some random shit". The quote in the previous sentence is a complete one. But then he said " some other ..". An incomplete quote. I personally think we should include the full stop though as it conveys more information and is less cognitive overhead, "it's obviously not redundant.". Even considering that we tend to treat punctuation as breaking/pausing I still think its appropriate as the quote ended AND its containing sentence.

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

#136

Post by enriquto »

odiroot wrote: post #16
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 wrote my whole master thesis as you describe. It was logical to me. Then my promotor complained that it's not correct so I had to go through whole 100+ pages to correct all the instances.

why? can't it be solved by a sed script with less than ten characters?

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

#137

Post by pteraspidomorph »

eCa wrote: post #42
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.

It makes some sense if you consider it a representation of the way you'd speak/read the sentence. If you read that sentence out loud, regardless of where you put the question mark you'll have to intone the quote as if the quote was a question, due to its context. So it functions "better" as a reading hint. (Though I'd also prefer to have the punctuation outside the quote.)

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

#138

Post by Aeolun »

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 like the consistency of always having my punctuation inside quotes if a quote is there.

Having to make the extra decision on whether the punctuation should be in, or outside the quote is too much to think about.

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

#139

Post by rocqua »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #101
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.

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

No, because a quote can contain a sub-sentence. The period adds meaning to the sentence by adding finality.

"You are going" has a very different meaning from "You are going.", because the first implies there is something `you` are going to do. Whilst the second implies you are being ordered to leave.

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