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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

#141

Post by Symbiote »

rom1v wrote: post #53
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…

This is usually configurable, e.g. Compose-Space-Space inserts a no-break space if the Compose key is set up, or AltGr+Space, Ctrl-Shift+Space etc.

(KDE has a dialog for customizing this under Settings→Input Devices→Keyboard→Advanced, where there are an impressive 16 possible options. It is just options to setxkbmap underneath.)

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

#142

Post by 0x000000001 »

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…

> Well, I don't really like that: it just doesn't look nice to me.

Well, I don't really like that; it just doesn't look nice to me.

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

#144

Post by Udo_Schmitz »

cygx wrote: post #131
Udo_Schmitz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :(

Yeah, Hacker News defaults to the Geneva font. Those quotation marks are not pretty :(

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

#145

Post by SimeVidas »

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.

She asked, “Did you find this on Yahoo!?”.

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

#146

Post by wombatmobile »

I didn’t know these different styles were actual idioms, or that one is “American” and the other “British”.

I’ve just always been unsure.

Now I’ve learned through this discussion that there is no definitive way, I feel freer to play it by ear and write what feels right at the time.

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

#147

Post by canadianfella »

enriquto wrote: post #136
odiroot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why don’t you write that script for us.

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

#148

Post by stkdump »

int_19h wrote: post #125
ivan_gammel wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pascal is fully self-consistent here: in it, semicolon is a statement separator, not a statement terminator. Since the statement before "end" is the last one in the block, there's no statement to separate it from with a trailing semicolon, and so it's a syntax error.

It's not a syntax error.

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

#149

Post by bambax »

currysausage wrote: post #134
bambax wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Ah, you're right, my translation of espace fine to En was incorrect, thanks for the correction.

An intriguing problem in typography is the patterns that spaces can form between words on different lines (called rivers); in traditional typography it is checked for but I don't know of any rendering engine that would do that automatically (in a browser, or on an e-reader for example).

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