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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

#171

Post by munchbunny »

tener wrote: post #162
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Parsing nested parens requires stack, which humans are vary bad at handling. So writing in this style will be harder to read compared to linear style that people are used to. There are topics inherently nonlinear, but they are often linearized or directly drawn in 2d space.

Also most languages already support nested clause structures without the use of parentheses.

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

#172

Post by Xen0byte »

beckerdo wrote: post #94
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?".

Very good counter-argument to the non-sensical punctuation mark redundancy argument.

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

#174

Post by barrkel »

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.

Pascal permits a null production for the statement grammar.

    simple-statement = 
              empty-statement 
            | assignment-statement
            | procedure-statement
            | goto-statement .

    empty-statement = .
from http://www.pascal-central.com/iso7185.html#6.8%20Statements (ISO 7185 Pascal)

In practice the separator-vs-terminator distinction mostly shows up in if-statements:

  if foo then
     bar
  else
     baz;
I believe that anywhere else in a statement context, you can put in as many extra ';' as you like and it won't make a difference. And of course you can drop the final ';' before 'end' or 'until'.

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

#175

Post by denton-scratch »

stkdump wrote: post #148
int_19h wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct - the redundant semi-colon denotes an empty statement.

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

#176

Post by yannis »

currysausage wrote: post #155
bambax wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I believe that both TeX (Knuth-Plass Line Breaking Algorithm) and InDesign (paragraph composer – expired US Patent 6,510,441) do this, so there is at least one open-source implementation that could be used as a starting point. Unfortunately though, the awareness for good and bad typography seems to be so low that this is probably not a priority for browser and e-reader vendors. It would be wonderful to have this as p…

TeX doesn't do this automatically, but is rare to see "rivers" in TeX produced publications due to the superiority of its paragraph building algorithm.

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

#177

Post by willhinsa »

joombaga wrote: post #74
iggldiggl wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really like the dedicated interrobang character, because it loses the distinction between ?! and !?, which is probably rather subtle, but to my mind definitively there.

How would you define "?!" vs "!?" ? I agree they're different. To me the "greater" feeling comes second. "?!" is more surprising, while "!?" is more confusing. With "‽" the feelings are equal.

I agree with you on ‽, but differ with you on the "!?" and "?!" -- for me, the first character is the stronger marker of sentiment.

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

#178

Post by jsmith99 »

bencollier49 wrote: post #40

For some reason, in school in Britain in the 1980s, we were taught rather religiously to always end anything inside speech marks with a comma. I'm not sure where this style comes from, but it confused me terribly and took me years to correct.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/195902/ending-a-... suggests this is the style recommended by Oxford Dictionaries.

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

#179

Post by crispyambulance »

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!

I feel the same way, but I think programmers should hold their feelings and just pick up an APA, MLA or Chicago style guide or whatever the equivalent is if you're writing in British English and embrace the rules. Or if you're publishing, let an editor fix your stuff.

Every effort to make a logically consistent "engineered" language has so far failed by any reasonable measure, notably, Esperanto. Others have tried and had even less success than Esperanto. For things to even change in language usage there really has to be a pain point or some kind of trauma or isolation. Mere aspiration for aesthetics or logical consistency isn't enough. How did the American English come to be anyway? A bunch of people got on boats and went to a remote wild continent and stayed there. Forever.

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

#180

Post by andrew_ »

MisterTea wrote: post #157

> In the American style, you almost always put periods and commas inside the quotation marks American here. I never put periods in the quotes unless the text within the quotes is a full sentence. I also had no idea there was an American or British style regarding quotes.

American here. Placing punctuation in a quote ending a sentence is how English Composition was taught to me in grade school and in college. I took to Eng Comp early on and had at least one class in the subject from 9th grade in 1993 through my final year of college in 2003.

IMHO this is right up there with tabs vs spaces. People are going to have very different takes on what looks aesthetically pleasing based on viewing repetition and training. There is no right answer, since both are widely accepted, only personal preference.

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