Don't expect natural language to logically "make sense". Just don't. It doesn't work by those rules, and trying to force it to do so just leads to seventeenth-century grammarian jackasses and Strunk and White.
Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
321–330 of 393 posts
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#322The linked article correctly uses "British" to denote the style of punctuation, I do not understand why OP decided to use "English" which implies that people in Scotland and Northern Ireland might punctuate differently.
Also the article's title is more juicy. HN sometimes goes overboard with editing titles. I guess it is a matter of taste.
This is an interesting service to track this sort of thing:
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#323Earlier 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…
One thing that irritates me is seeing "foreign" quoting styles in English, do editors or keyboard settings do this automatically ? If I'm writing French then I will use «quote», I don't mix things between languages.
I could say the same about punctuation spacing. For some reason, I see this mistake a lot in some places like Quora (which is popular in India): "Putting the space before punctuation ,like this .It drives me nuts .How could anyone ever think that is correct ?"
Also, French conventions like putting the dollar sign after the amount (123$), or spaces in between all punctuation, like you used in your first sentence.
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#324Prefer the hackerly style of quotation punctuation: the period ends the sentence:
> Dr. Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus”.
This is one big sentence which contains an embedded quote. The period ends that big sentence.
The quote contains a complete sentence. Therefore, arguably, it deserves its own period.
> Dr. Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”.
So this matter revolves around the idea that we want only one period, and so the question is which of these two periods do we elide.
I'm arguing that if we are going to elide, the one we should elide is the inner one, because it's of less importance. Eliding the outer one leaves the entire sentence unterminated, whereas the quote is obviously terminated by the closing quote.
(What is the sentence period for? It's for indicating where sentences end, so that the reader doesn't get confused parsing the end of one sentence together with the start of the next one. A closing quote has a solid end indicator already.)
If there are multiple quoted sentences, then those except the last preserve their terminating punctuator:
> Dr. Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “How shall I refute it? Ah, I refute it thus”.
What if the quoted sentence ends in a terminator different from the one of the embedding clause? Then we cannot elide either one:
> Dr. Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “How shall I refute it?”.
Except if the inner one is a period. We can establish the convention that a missing punctuator inside a quote is an implied period (if the quote is obviously a complete clause):
> Did Dr. Johnson really say “I refute it thus”?
Something like that. We should strive, in some halfway rational way, not to leave the overall sentence without terminating punctuation.
(I do not agree that .". has a redundant period. Two different sentences are ending, using their own punctuation marks which are not related, and could potentially be different. I agree that it's ugly. Eliding the inner period is not the same as eliminating it; we are making it implied. Something implied is still semantically there, just not as a visible syntactic token.)
Note that whatever." does not indicate the end of a sentence; it can plausibly continue:
> Dr. Johnson said "I refute it thus." and kicked the rock.
As soon as we have additional words after the quote, we have two periods unless we elide one. In this case, we definitely must not elide the one after "rock". Whereas eliding the quoted one according to the hackerly style leaves a clean result:
> Dr. Johnson said "I refute it thus" and kicked the rock.
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#325I think, given that this is just some guy’s opinion (it’s not like this is someone who has a job as a professional copyeditor or publisher of a respected style guide), the only real takeaway most people should take from this is: There are various conventions you can adopt around quoted punctuation You, as an individual writer of English prose, have the option of adopting a style you prefer It’s okay for reasonable pe…
Basically, all interpunction characters have started as "some guy's opinion".
All graphemes for the characters, too.
I know the "rules", but I've been also intentionally writing it in what I refer to as "functional style", e.g.:
""" Greg's reaction was "But what of the otters?!". Mary's "Nobody cares about otters!" was received with a stunned shock. Joseph calmly said "I'm ambivalent.". But Ophelia just "didn't care".
After hearing about the whole ordeal, Mary's brother was livid: "«Nobody cares about otters!»?! She's a bloody otterologist!"... and then he visibly shook, and his face blanked as he slowly collapsed into his armchair, looking broken, repeatingly mumbling to himself "Illogical... illogical...".
"""
First three are verbatim restated statements; fourth is a partial and/or summary statement (no quoted punctuation); fifth is a very complex example (and a long [but fully functional!] sentence.
We also need light-, mid-, heavy-strength commas. :p
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#326As 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.
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,…
You mean, "typograhicl redunat".
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What ligature would you propose for "? or "!
There's no real ligature for those, but those characters don't really take up any unnecessary whitespace. Combining low and high punctuation marks makes more sense. You could try to turn "! into a well-kerned '!', with he quotation marks very close to the exclamation point, but for the question mark such a system would probably not work.
That said, perhaps there's something to be found in other languages. Some quote with «quote», some with “quote”, others with „quote“, and there's many other variations. I can see how ligatures can work with constructions such as ¿question? can have the quotation makes placed closer in the beginning of the question marks, especially with the slow change from the angled brackets to the English quotation marks in some Spanish speaking countries.
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct, but that just shows why the American style is so confusing. That we have to have an exception for more meaningful punctuation marks just serves to confuse, and emphasizes just how bad the default is.
I didn't even realize that periods were an exception. (as an American) I've always preserved the original quote for all three forms of punctuation, and put a sentence-ender only if there isn't one inside the quote. I'd bet most americans do the same, style guides be damned. IMO, it's also totally crazy to export a punctuation mark out of the quote always.
True, you really only have to worry about it if you're writing or editing for a teacher or publisher who wants you to adhere to some specific style. The real annoying thing for me (as an American) was having different teachers teach different things in school. (Same with double spaces between sentences in typing and the oxford comma.) At least when the teacher used a style guide, there was a source of consistency I could turn to, even if I disagreed with them.
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems wrong because it is. > Question marks and exclamation points have their own rules. > If they apply to the quoted material, they go within the quotation marks. If they apply to the whole sentence, they go outside it https://www.grammarly.com/blog/quotation-marks/
I have seen things like: > The password is ’%>>~|]#^|,’ which is awesome. Which is, as far as I know, correct according to the rules.
There's nothing I like more than typing a URL at the end of a sentence and getting the punctuation wrapped up in the URL. /s
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s an æsthetic choice in the end. If I could put the period below the quotation mark, then I would do so as I already do in writing.
> It’s an æsthetic choice in the end. Æsthetic is misplaced pedantry, since the word comes from Greek through German, rather than Latin. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=aesthetic
> misplaced pedantry
Them's mighty strong words there.
> since the word comes from Greek through German, rather than Latin.
That's not a rule. Remember, this is language. It does seems like a dated spelling though, similar to "coöperate". It shows up in 19th century publishing.