[HN Gopher] Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuati...
___________________________________________________________________
Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the
American
Author : erwald
Score : 563 points
Date : 2021-09-15 08:32 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.erichgrunewald.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.erichgrunewald.com)
| po wrote:
| The real answer is to use the British style but then combine the
| " and . into a ligature in the font so that it looks nicer like
| the American style. Simple!
|
| edit: Just searched and there are some people doing exactly this
| with negative kerning:
|
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/369077/overlapping-q...
|
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/202799/how-can-i-typ...
| xdennis wrote:
| How does this work with longer punctuation like "?", "!", or
| "!?"?
| albrewer wrote:
| I like this solution way more than anything proposed here. It's
| how I'd write it by hand.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| What ligature would you propose for "? or "!
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| You don't need one for those. Even in the American style
| those are supposed to be placed inside or outside the
| quotations depending on whether the question/exclamation is
| part of the quote or not.
| flyingfences wrote:
| As I recall, this historically was the standard. In
| handwriting, the ligature could be and was placed naturally.
| In professional printing with moveable type, the ligature
| could be included in the typeset. Only once typewriters were
| invented and couldn't spare a key for every ligature did the
| sequential style appear and the British and American styles
| diverge.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This seems like it ought to be possible on a typewriter --
| or at least, one with a true backspace. I'm not sure if the
| backspace was an advanced/late feature, though. It seems
| pretty simple, but mechanical parts are pretty fiddly I
| guess.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > _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.
| andrew_ wrote:
| 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.
| derbOac wrote:
| FWIW, as another anecdatum from an American, I was always
| taught the "British style" was the correct way, and the
| "American style" was incorrect. They were never referred to
| as "British" or "American" though, just "correct" and
| "incorrect".
|
| I prefer the "British" style, FWIW. Maybe it's just what I
| was taught, but I have encountered arguments for the other
| way periodically (causing me to have to check), and I always
| preferred the way I learned for the reasons in the article.
| dnautics wrote:
| the "british" style also introduces an ambiguity. Did the
| original quote contain the puncutation, or does it derive
| from the outside context?
|
| It's pretty clear to me that the correct method (on the
| grounds of respecting source material) is: "punctuation
| inside, if it comes from the source, punctuation outside if
| it's from the outside context".
|
| And there are times when quotes aren't even direct quotes,
| they could be scare quotes. Why the hell would you ever put
| punctuation inside of a scare quote? I don't think any
| american would do this.
|
| E.g.:
|
| Dough is pronounced like "doe." -- TERRIBLE. Stab my eyes
| out.
|
| Dough is pronounced like "doe". -- sensible.
| ahwvd37js wrote:
| It high school I got yelled at when I put the period before the
| final quote mark. In college I got yelled at when I did the
| opposite. Both seem completely arbitrary.
| macdice wrote:
| 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 ;-)
| ranko wrote:
| 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).
| dredmorbius wrote:
| cOnsider tHe pOssible cOmpromises aVailable tO tHe eNterprising
| lAnguage sTylist!
| TillE wrote:
| A weird thing British papers do is de-capitalize acronyms. It's
| a useful signal for pronunciation, but it's also just...wrong?
| Like, the agency is called NASA, not Nasa.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| <pedant>
|
| The UK practise is for _initialisms_ to be capiitalised and
| _acronyms_ , which are prounced rather than spelled out, to
| have an initial capital (when rerfering to a proper noun) but
| lower-cased following.
|
| So "Nasa", but "FBI".
|
| There's some adoption of this in US English, though typically
| for words which have fallen into normal use and don't
| identify specific organisations or entities: scuba, radar,
| sonar, laser.
|
| The UK style isn't uniform in all cases, particularly where
| initialism are pronouced with a mix of spelled-out letters
| and pronounced terms. So "HIV", but "Aids"
| (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/01/through-
| posi...). I believe much US military usage falls under this
| pattern, as with USAMRID or USCENTCOM. In the latter case,
| _The Guardian_ chooses the entirely consistent ...
| "USCentcom".
|
| The same source gives us "GBU-43/B or Moab, known as the
| 'mother of all bombs'".
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/15/us-mother-
| of-a...
|
| </pedant>
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| It's less logical even than that. It's almost every word. On
| the NYT homepage right now, for example, one story is "Justice
| Dept. Asks Judge to Block Texas From Enforcing Abortion Law".
| So "From" is capitalised but "to" isn't.
|
| Weirdly, scrolling down the page, the technology section
| appears to go its own way on capitalisation rules: "Apple's new
| iPhone 13 is better, but not by much." is followed by "Apple
| Issues Emergency Updates to Close a Spyware Flaw".
| nkozyra wrote:
| I'm surprised by this, as the Times has a fairly well-
| followed style book. I'd be curious if this pattern followed
| in print or if things are just more lax online.
|
| edit: Having just compared, it does look like the content
| generated online has a looser pattern than the articles
| generated for this morning's paper.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| 4-letter-long and above prepositions are capitalized. Can't
| remember where I got that rule, but they're probably using
| that; I use it for my music collection.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > 4-letter-long and above prepositions are capitalized.
| Can't remember where I got that rule, but they're probably
| using that; I use it for my music collection.
|
| This is the guide I follow, and it would only capitalize
| preposition five characters or longer:
|
| http://aitech.ac.jp/~ckelly/midi/help/caps.html
| BostonFern wrote:
| It's called title case, and it's not determined by the
| length of a word but by whether or not a word is minor. The
| rules defining minor words vary slightly between styles,
| but they're usually prepositions and articles.
| Spivak wrote:
| You and APA seem to disagree on this
| https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-
| guidelines/capitaliza... but it's ultimately one of
| semantics since if your list of minor words are all three
| letters or less then it's the same.
|
| > Lowercase only minor words that are three letters or
| fewer in a title or heading (except the first word in a
| title or subtitle or the first word after a colon, em
| dash, or end punctuation in a heading)
| rplst8 wrote:
| I learned it as all prepositions and articles, unless
| they start the title.
| ctrlp wrote:
| This makes sense to me and looks good. Some other quote style
| ideas:
|
| - use double quotes when quoting something someone said or wrote;
| use single quotes when emphasizing a jargony word or words, or a
| short paraphrase (e.g. 'materialist philosophy').
|
| - use double quotes for "scare quotes" because the doubling acts
| as emphasis markers and is pantomimable with two fingers (one-
| fingered air-quotes look ridiculous).
|
| - use double quotes around single quotes when nesting quotes.
| Avoid nesting more than one level of quotes.
| CRConrad wrote:
| These are not so much "ideas" as already-common practice,
| aren't they?
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| UK English uses single quote marks by default, falling back
| to double quote marks for nesting.
| bhandziuk wrote:
| What's the difference between scare quotes and a short catch
| phrase?
| ctrlp wrote:
| Scare quotes are emotion/sense markers. They suggest irony,
| sarcasm, "skepticism", etc... A short phrase is just a short
| phrase.
| amelius wrote:
| Sorry, but I prefer less rules over more rules unless they
| provide some tangible benefit. This is just rules for the sake of
| rules.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _I prefer less rules over more rules_
|
| As you illustrate by saying "less rules" instead of "fewer
| rules." (I agree with you: For any language, the less that non-
| native speakers have to worry about tripping over some finicky
| rule, the better.)
| some_random wrote:
| I'm going to be entirely honest, this seems like a complete waste
| of time for everyone involved. The point of writing is to
| communicate, and I don't see how the position of punctuation in
| relation to quotation marks affects the understanding of the
| communication to the reader. Just pick one and stick with it.
| codeofdusk wrote:
| This style of punctuation is "logical quotation", not necessarily
| British:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Logical_quotation_on...
| toby- wrote:
| This is true. You can find the 'American style' in the UK
| occasionally, especially in fiction - it's not exceptionally
| rare.
|
| But regardless, the styles have come to be known as 'American'
| and 'British' because they generally are preferred in American
| and British English respectively, even if it's not absolute:
| Americans tend to be taught US style, and Brits tend to be
| taught British style.
| [deleted]
| Tainnor wrote:
| > 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.
| sbuk wrote:
| _Politics and the English Language_ [0] has this covered, though
| not directly referencing punctuation; _" vi. Break any of these
| rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous"._
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu..
| .
| Y_Y wrote:
| If one is going to look to an authority in English, I think
| there's none better than Orwell. There are those of the
| opinion, however, that with regard to "outright barbary" the
| ship has long since sailed.
| chromatin wrote:
| Hear, hear. An under appreciated long-form essay that I refer
| colleagues to frequently.
| donatj wrote:
| 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 doing so changed the meaning of the quote, and it
| felt like a misrepresentation. This being the "correct" way to do
| it has always irritated me.
|
| I ended up rewording the sentence so it wouldn't end with the
| quotation, and have just actively avoided ending sentences in
| quotes ever since.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| I think you're right;
|
| > Why did Jake believe the AI was "going to kill us all?"
|
| This reads, to me, like Jake's quoted sentence was originally a
| question. If the original sentence was an assertion or a
| statement, then you're right this fundamentally changes the
| meaning and strength of Jake's sentence.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _I felt like doing so changed the meaning of the quote, and it
| felt like a misrepresentation... I ended up rewording the
| sentence so it wouldn't end with the quotation, and have just
| actively avoided ending sentences in quotes ever since._
|
| I appreciate the skill involved in avoiding ambiguity. The hard
| part is knowing the unknown unknowns, ya know? I read both
| sentences the same way and can't really fathom why someone else
| wouldn't! (Of course, I don't have the context of the original
| quote here, so maybe that comes into play... but I don't know,
| and probably shouldn't have to!)
| shannifin wrote:
| Unlike periods and commas, putting question marks and
| exclamation marks inside the quotation when they are not part
| of the quote is against AP, APA, Chicago, and MLA style
| specifications... Granted, I don't know if technical writing
| typically adheres to some other style, but shoving a question
| mark inside a quote it isn't part of is definitely _not_
| typical of American styles in general.
| lolinder wrote:
| 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.
| dnautics wrote:
| 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.
| shannifin wrote:
| 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.
| sebastialonso wrote:
| wow, your instructor is an idiot.
| eCa wrote:
| 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.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| 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/
| eCa wrote:
| I have seen things like:
|
| > The password is '%>>~|]#^|,' which is awesome.
|
| Which is, as far as I know, correct according to the rules.
| PennRobotics wrote:
| 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
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't think the normal rules of grammar are designed to
| handle this case. I would probably write something like
|
| > The password, which is awesome, is:
|
| > %>>~|]#^|
|
| This also has the benefit of putting the password on it's
| own line, which should make life easier for people
| actually consuming the document.
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| 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.)
| beckerdo wrote:
| 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?".
| Xen0byte wrote:
| Very good counter-argument to the non-sensical punctuation
| mark redundancy argument.
| beckerdo wrote:
| Also there are the possibilities for various questions and
| exclamations.
|
| Why did Jake ask "Can I have another biscuit?"?
|
| I was frightened when Jake shouted "Who are you?"!
|
| My trousers were soiled when Jake shouted "Boo!"!
|
| Why did I soil my trousers when Jake shouted "Boo!"?
| user-the-name wrote:
| The only reason the "American style" exists is a technical
| workaround: It was easier to damage the expensive lead type used
| in print shops a century ago if the thin period character was
| used on the end of the line, rather than the thicker, sturdier
| quotation mark, so they were swapped as a cost-saving measure.
|
| None of this has been relevant for many decades, and people have
| forgotten the reason for this rule. It was never correct to do,
| it was a choice to do it the wrong way around out of convenience.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Source?
| anandoza wrote:
| What about sentences that end in a period without a quote? That
| seems like it'd be much more common.
| [deleted]
| bambax wrote:
| The reason this problem exists is because computers and font
| libraries don't have all the characters we need. The point or
| comma should be _at the same place_ as the quotes, under them,
| not before or after.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _at the same place as the quotes, under them_
|
| What?
| OJFord wrote:
| See po's comment providing SE links for doing it in tex:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28536834
| bambax wrote:
| Ah, yes. Exactly that.
| coldtea wrote:
| OK, but why? Is this a convention?
| bambax wrote:
| It looks better and it saves space.
| coldtea wrote:
| I'd argue the first is subjective (and I don't think it
| looks better personally). It's also different to how we
| use the same punctuation otherwise.
|
| It does save space, but I'd say that's neither here nor
| there. It isn't like space for an extra period at the end
| of a sentence was ever at a premium.
|
| At best, for a whole 200+ page book, you'd save a page or
| so.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| And this is why more simply, the quotation mark can imply the
| period;
|
| similarly, the comma can be inherited by the formulation and
| implied (there is no sacrifice in '<<That's too bad>>, John
| said, <<but you can recover>>' for '<<That's too bad, but you
| can recover>>' - the break is in the formulation and the
| explicit comma is redundant).
| alexanderskates wrote:
| And what of exclamation or question marks?
| coldtea wrote:
| 100% agree.
| kbos87 wrote:
| Im not someone with strong opinions on this sort of thing, but it
| has never made sense to me that I'd put a period inside quotation
| marks if it isn't a part of the quote.
| afranchuk wrote:
| I was taught the American way (as I live in the US), but
| immediately rejected it (even at a young age) and did it the
| British way, though I had no idea that's what it was called.
| Besides the week or so when teachers were covering that in their
| syllabus, nobody _ever_ complained or noted it at all :)
| wombatmobile wrote:
| 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.
| virgilp wrote:
| Is this just a version of "Prefer tabs over spaces when writing
| code"? Because if so, I already know the outcome of this debate.
| chromatin wrote:
| No, I think not, because the quotation marks imbue semantic
| meaning to what's inside.
| optymizer wrote:
| I thought there was a generally accepted way of signaling that a
| quote is incomplete - by using [...]. For example:
|
| "[...] the first game was better, but not in a good way"
|
| There's no need to use the full stop inside the quote to show
| that the sentence had ended. That can be the default, because
| most time it doesn't matter, but in the cases where it is
| relevant to show that there's content after, then why not:
|
| "I thought the first game was better [...]"
| vzaliva wrote:
| Learning English I found American quotation style very weird. It
| would be interesing to know if any nother language do something
| like this and where this traidition comes from. We certainly do
| not do this in russian and ukrainian I've learned in school.
| rom1v wrote:
| The first time I read a book in English, I thought the quotation
| mark after the dot was a typo/syntax error (it didn't parse
| correctly, and it made no sense to me).
|
| After so many instances of the exact same typo in the book, I
| thought the author/editor had a specific problem with ordering
| quotation marks and dots.
|
| It's only when I read another English book with the same "syntax
| error" that I realized that it was not a bug in English.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| The American version is often a simplification of the British
| version. I also find the American version to be more readable.
| Simpler, easier to use syntax seems preferable to me over verbose
| style.
| fortran77 wrote:
| No. I will use a Nations's preferred punctuation. To do otherwise
| is rude and inconsiderate.
| CRConrad wrote:
| So, which nation ("Nations's"?!?) did you write that for? Do
| you know where I -- and all the rest of us who saw it -- are
| sitting as we read it?
| codefoster wrote:
| Agreed. Unfortunately, I don't often see examples of a language
| evolving on suggestion - even reasonable suggestion.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| 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.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/195902/ending-a-...
| suggests this is the style recommended by Oxford Dictionaries.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Orthography in specific and natural language in general
| (formalized and written, or otherwise) is not beholden to be
| "logical;"
|
| idiosyncratic deviance from established cultural norms looks
| adolescent in anything other than a private subculture.
|
| Specifically in American English, which unlike French French or
| German German, does not have a state-sanctioned standards body
| attempting (and often failing) to police or mandate its
| evolution.
|
| Earnest advice for those tempted to adopt "logical" style in
| American English language written communication: adhere to the
| standards.
|
| Relevant:
| https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Blog/Item/Ruzvelt%20...
| xfz wrote:
| I think they messed up; the first sentences of each of the first
| two examples are identical apart from the reference.
|
| > Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded,
| "I refute it thus."[1] and
|
| > Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded,
| "I refute it thus."[3]
|
| Second one should be:
|
| Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded,
| "I refute it thus".[3]
| anf0 wrote:
| Does anyone have any thoughts on date formats? E.g. d/m/y vs.
| m/d/y?
| CRConrad wrote:
| "m/d/y" must die, _die,_ DIE!
| a9h74j wrote:
| Or did you really mean _die_ , die, DIE? :)
| CRConrad wrote:
| Or der, die, das...?
| dcminter wrote:
| In prose, use month names (i.e. 1st Jan 1979, or Jan 1st 1970).
| Where numbers must be used for some reason use four-digit-year
| first if you can. If you can't use the dictated standard or, if
| there isn't one (raising the obvious question of why that would
| be), go with the form that will be familiar to most of your
| readers.
|
| In other words, as with all things, prefer unambiguous forms
| but consider and respect your audience.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| How do British people pronounce the date that they write as 15
| September, 2021? Americans write the date the same way we
| pronounce it (September 15), but this leads to the unfortunate
| mm/dd/yy style of abreviation.
| flyingfences wrote:
| "Fifteenth [of] September"
| red_trumpet wrote:
| Just use d/m/y as the rest of the world.
| riffic wrote:
| no:
|
| https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1179:_ISO_8601
| posedge wrote:
| The only true format is the programmer's yyyy-mm-dd :)
| Akronymus wrote:
| 8601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
|
| which can be any of these:
|
| YYYY-MM-DD YYYY-MM YYYYMMDD
| aendruk wrote:
| ISO 8601 is proprietary and people can't even read it without
| each paying a $170 access fee. Instead, prefer IETF RFC 3339
| (mentioned in your link) which is a more practical open
| standard.
| Tepix wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That's typical of older English typography as well.
|
| Here in a book of classics printed in 1910:
|
| https://archive.org/details/harvardclassics40elio/page/76/mo...
|
| And in David Hume's _Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects_
| (1753):
|
| https://archive.org/details/essaysandtreati00humegoog/page/n...
| bambax wrote:
| 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.
| rom1v wrote:
| Hmmm, that's true:
| https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espace_fine_ins%C3%A9cable
|
| However, LibreOffice inserts a non-breaking space U+00A0
| instead :(
| CRConrad wrote:
| So the French don't break their spaces, they cut them.
|
| Reminds me of https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sekat%C3%B6r
| currysausage wrote:
| Note that em (current point size) and en (1/2 em) spaces are
| both wider than the regular space character (typically 1/4
| em). An _espace fine insecable_ (narrow no-break space) is
| even smaller, usually as small as a Unicode thin space ( 1/5
| or 1/6 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...
| bambax wrote:
| 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).
| currysausage wrote:
| 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 part of WeasyPrint or
| something similar.
| yannis wrote:
| 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.
| weinzierl wrote:
| On the other hand, it was the English who used to have some
| extra space between sentences compared to the space between
| words. This is still the default in LaTeX, but I believe
| everyone turns it off by using the \frenchspacing command in
| the preamble.
|
| Also German has its own verbs for "for the insertion of
| inappropriate spaces _before_ a punctuation mark. " and "for
| the insertion of inappropriate spaces _after_ a punctuation
| mark. "[1] which are often used in a derogatory manner in
| connection with people who do it wrongly.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenken
| rom1v wrote:
| > 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 text
| in markdown, it's a bit irritating indeed.
| Symbiote wrote:
| 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.)
| BossHamster wrote:
| Not only is it irritating, it looks ugly as hell.
| bambax wrote:
| It doesn't look ugly at all if the space is of the correct
| length.
| rplst8 wrote:
| I found this out years ago, and adopted the British style. It
| makes way more sense and reads better.
|
| I'll also put in my two cents here about spaces after a period. I
| always use two spaces after a sentence and one after an
| abbreviation.
|
| If you only ever use one, there is too much ambiguity around
| sentences that end with an abbreviation.
| chelonian wrote:
| I think the solution is to always add just a few more words at
| the end of a sentence:
|
| > Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded,
| "I refute it thus." and then said no more.
| happymellon wrote:
| But there you have just come to the same British conclusion
| that the end of the sentence is outside the quotation.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Except that a quotation that doesn't end the containing
| sentence isn't punctuated that way in either US or UK style;
| with the added text, it would be either:
|
| (UK) Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot
| rebounded, 'I refute it thus', and then said no more.
|
| or:
|
| (US) Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot
| rebounded, "I refute it thus," and then said no more.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| I'm not aware of the punctuation mark going outside the quotation
| being, "British style," and I'm struggling to find other
| references to it being so. It's certainly not what is done in
| most British typography.
|
| Putting the punctuation mark inside the quotation marks has been
| a thing ever since printing, and I always thought it was done to
| avoid have an isolated full stop on a printing plate, which could
| be damaged relatively easily., but this may be a retroactive
| justification.
| rossjudson wrote:
| Teach an elementary school kid yet another wrinkle in the English
| language around where they should punctuation marks? No thanks.
| jmull wrote:
| Eh, worrying much about this stuff is fairly pointless. It's not
| like there's a rules committee we can petition.
|
| I do use the British style when I can get away with it, but for
| anything formal or important I just suck it up and do it the way
| it's supposed to be done.
|
| Anyway, if I could change rules of English, this wouldn't be that
| high a priority.
| mcguire wrote:
| 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.
| bumblebritches5 wrote:
| You mean using apostrophes as quotes?
|
| gross
| shannifin wrote:
| Agree with the post; interestingly, in grade school (here in
| America) I was actually taught both ways depending on the
| teacher's preference / belief (assuming we were not writing MLA
| research papers)... this mostly led to perpetual confusion, so
| we'd often just put the period directly under the quotation. (Of
| course, couldn't do that for typed assignments.) I remember one
| of my English teachers accepting both ways because she could
| never keep it straight herself.
| codingdave wrote:
| > There is no reason that there should be two different
| approaches to punctuation in the English language.
|
| Why not? We have different vocabulary, different spelling. Our
| accents are sufficiently different that non-native speakers can't
| always understand both.
|
| So serious question - why wouldn't punctuation also differ?
| runeks wrote:
| 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.
| mdpm wrote:
| think of it as a self-closing element. Like <br/> became <br>.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Yep, I agree and I do this too. Even in school I was willing to
| eat the docked points for doing it this way.
| baktubi wrote:
| Hmm. This feels a bit wrong to me. Double period makes longer
| pause, and wedged between a quote it doesn't flow well:
|
| .". Feels like a visual stutter.
|
| Either ." or ". are more final and visually stable.
|
| I'd argue depending on whether the pause affected by the period
| is important to the quote itself, put it in the quote. Then
| again, a block-quotation is probably more suitable for that
| scenario. Personally, for basic quotes in prose I'd put the
| period on the outside of quote because that directs readers to
| pause after the quote ends, not before.
| xdennis wrote:
| If it's like coding styles, almost anything to do with style
| is a matter of how much you're used to it. If .". was the
| norm you might not find it so stylistically wrong.
|
| But ." is always syntactically wrong when then quoted text
| didn't have a full stop in it, and ". is ambiguous about
| whether it's a complete sentence or not.
| bambax wrote:
| Strongly disagree. This is an abomination. Language and
| typography have to be _elegant_ in addition to intelligible.
| reedf1 wrote:
| Would you sacrifice clarity for elegance?
| ttctciyf wrote:
| What clarity is sacrificed? Is it in doubt that the
| sentence ended?
|
| The single period favours both elegance and clarity over
| slavish and unimaginative punctiliousness.
| bambax wrote:
| Good question! Perhaps one of the most important questions
| regarding writing...
|
| I would argue clarity and elegance don't oppose one
| another; elegance means being as clear as possible without
| being clumsy or heavy handed, and without insulting your
| reader's intelligence. Said reader is not a machine,
| they're supposed to be fluent in the language.
|
| We should reduce ambiguity as much as possible, but no more
| than that. Adding signs where no ambiguity remains only
| worsens the signal to noise ratio.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Besides, if you look at it upside down, you might be tempted
| to invoke Godwin's Law.
| dspillett wrote:
| They don't _have_ to be. They _should_ be where-ever possible
| without affecting meaning or legibility.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| How is the period in the quoted section relevant to the reader,
| in light of the close quote character terminating the sentence
| and quote both?
| TedShiller wrote:
| lol
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I think it's weird that a punctuation mark inside a quote can
| end the sentence that contains the quote.
|
| It doesn't. The end quote with a period inside it ends the
| sentence.
|
| > I'd argue like this: in the above case there are two
| sentences
|
| There aren't. English doesn't nest or overlap sentences. Ever.
| Therr are plenty of ways in which English combines multiple
| units which each could otherwise be their own sentences into
| more complex sentences, but none of them involve having
| something which remains a sentence inside a longer sentence.
| soheil wrote:
| > The end quote with a period inside it ends the sentence.
|
| What a weird interpretation. Two characters shouldn't be
| needed to end a sentence, only a period can end a sentence.
| It'd be a lot easier to postulate the period inside ends the
| sentence and the quotation mark ends the quote that just ran
| outside the end of the sentence by one character.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Not even parenthetical remarks with opening and closing
| parentheses or mdashes?
|
| I won't say it isn't so (that would be redundant), but this
| example makes my point again.
| Veen wrote:
| 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, and then a space, before beginning the next sentence with
| a capital letter.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Did you really say, "I tend to agree with the author?"
|
| See the problem there? The quoted sentence is not a question,
| but the outer sentence is; why, then, is the question mark
| inside the quotation marks? Double punctuation would solve
| that ambiguity, and would not be redundant.
|
| Alternatively, and I'm not sure which is correct, if the
| question mark is outside the quotation marks, was the quote a
| complete sentence?
| abduhl wrote:
| The question mark is supposed to go outside the quote if it
| is not part of the quote, FYI. Same with exclamation
| points. Internalizing only happens with periods and commas.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| That's what it looked like to me, too, but isn't it
| telling that we can't treat punctuation consistently?
| CiceroCiceronis wrote:
| We can treat it consistently, it just takes a full book-
| length style guide to do so. Exceptions of exceptions are
| a frustrating form of consistency, but they are
| consistent nevertheless.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| In any colloquial sense, the existence of exceptions
| means there is inconsistency.
| quesera wrote:
| Also awkward:
|
| Did you ask, "Is this your dog?"?
| philsnow wrote:
| To me, seeing that punctuation is soothing. It's finding
| another person who I know thinks the same way I do, if
| only about this one, pedantic thing.
| joemi wrote:
| I do wonder if that kind of thing is awkward just because
| we're not used to it...
| kazinator wrote:
| You mean, "typograhicl redunat".
| gilgoomesh wrote:
| Do you mean, like this: ""I refute it thus.", he said."? It
| does get ugly.
| rivo wrote:
| What would be the proper punctuation if you rearranged the
| sentence slightly?
|
| _Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, "I refute it
| thus.", as his foot rebounded._
|
| Is the period redundant? Or the comma after it? None of them?
| This looks almost as ugly as two periods.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| The period before the quotation mark is redundant, because
| the quotation mark implies it (in this case).
| a9h74j wrote:
| To me it looks wrong to omit a period in a famous short
| one-sentence statement. To stay within American style, I
| would rearrange the sentence to end with the quote, "I
| refute it thus."
| gumby wrote:
| For simplicity, every sentence should end with a full stop
| (period). Thus: How are you today?.
| This is important!.
|
| Which clearly demonstrates that ! and ? can appear in the
| middle of a sentence, just as ; and , can: I
| want to call to your attention this very important!! point:
| always checks the return value of your system calls.
|
| I do draw the line at introducing scoping operators though it
| would simplify the grammar.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| The dot below ? and ! is the full stop.
|
| Thus implying the existence of non-dotted versions for mid-
| sentence usage.
| sfg wrote:
| I like the 'more logical still' style.
|
| The structure of the whole looks incomplete and unbalanced
| without the second full-stop, which I find ugly. I guess that
| I care more about logical structure (or my idea of logical
| structure), than typographical utility.
| majormajor wrote:
| Once we're accepting that appearance is part of our decision,
| the American one has just as much appeal as the British one.
| dandare wrote:
| Redundant and ugly are very subjective qualities in this
| case.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| 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.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| 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.
| Veen wrote:
| In general writing, you have to be careful to balance
| repetition. At one extreme is what's been called "elegant
| variation"[0] and at the other is monotonous repetition,
| which hurts readability.
|
| But, as you say, in technical writing, it's enormously
| irritating. I do a fair bit of freelance writing, and it
| pisses me off no end when editors and clients change a
| technical term for an apparent near synonym because they
| don't understand the nuance. It makes the sentence
| nonsensical and makes me look as though I don't know what
| I'm talking about.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegant_variation
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| Absolutely. My comment is only about whether or not the
| second period is logically redundant.
| tener wrote:
| 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.
| mark-r wrote:
| Is "vary bad" a clever pun, or just an amusing typo?
| munchbunny wrote:
| Also most languages already support nested clause
| structures without the use of parentheses.
| Veen wrote:
| They do, but there's a limit to how much recursive
| embedding the average reader can cope with, especially if
| the writer embeds a lot of modifying clauses in the
| middle of the main clause so the reader is left waiting
| for information they need to make sense of the sentence
| as a whole.
| munchbunny wrote:
| Absolutely agree. It's probably the biggest disconnect I
| feel between how ideas are structured in my head and how
| to best communicate them in written format.
|
| Parentheticals in English sit in this sort of midpoint
| between a modifying clause for necessary elaboration and
| a footnote/end-note for optional detail, and lots of
| people including me use parentheses where "inlining" the
| parentheses or moving them to a footnote would be more
| appropriate. That's in addition to conventional uses of
| parentheses, like to expand abbreviations.
| hjek wrote:
| > * 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.
|
| Any level of nested parenthesis is fine (is what _I_
| think at least (as someone who 's written a bit of Lisp
| of Lisp (or Racket and Clojure specifically) (because you
| get kinda used to it (when in a way they just become
| invisible (or unnoticeable))))). But nested quotations is
| also an issue with backtick (`) when doing command
| substitution in the shell, and we have to resort to $()
| to fix it. There's not really a $()-like syntax for
| written English though.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _There 's not really a $()-like syntax for written
| English though._
|
| There sort of is, if you use "smart" quotes. "Hard to
| find on a phone keyboard though, and not that distinct."
| OskarS wrote:
| 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!
| repsilat wrote:
| > _everyone else is perfectly fine with_
|
| My newspaper will shorten "United States" to "U.S.", and
| not add an extra period at the end of a sentence. (Not
| sure if the spaces are different widths.) When the next
| word would naturally start with a capital letter it can
| be difficult to tell whether the sentence ends after the
| abbreviation, sometimes making for garden-path sentences.
|
| >> _There have been some rumblings inside the U.S.
| Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer said in an
| interview..._
|
| Though I _am_ a programmer, so maybe it is just us...
| crispyambulance wrote:
| 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.
| mark-r wrote:
| This is sound, pragmatic advice. But it doesn't mean we
| have to like it.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| 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.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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.
| barrkel wrote:
| 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'.
| stkdump wrote:
| It's not a syntax error.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Correct - the redundant semi-colon denotes an empty
| statement.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| In those day when moving cursors with full screen editor
| (which is Not vi or Emacs), how many hours of my life
| wasted on this deletion of semicolons. Sigh.
|
| Still I actually struggled each time this given not
| exactly sure I am in English or American camp.
| montroser wrote:
| See also automatic semicolon insertion in JavaScript, and
| conditional permission to omit closing <p> tags in HTML.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
|
| https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/grouping-
| content.html...
| bujak300 wrote:
| 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
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _> 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.
| afarviral wrote:
| 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.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _> you would assume its complete in the absence of a
| double period_
|
| That is true for the inner sentence, but again, I'm
| talking about the outer sentence. It needs its own
| terminator to make it unambiguously clear that it is
| complete.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I've never seen a double period used to mean anything. An
| ellipsis is a specific mark made by three periods. Or is
| this a Britishism?
| leephillips wrote:
| It's not used for anything. I can't imagine where anyone
| got the idea that it is.
| ChristianGeek wrote:
| Isn't it a rule that if you quote a complete sentence it
| must end the quoting sentence?
| optymizer wrote:
| > Without turning the page, there would be no way of
| knowing whether the quoting sentence is complete.
|
| and he said: "Mary, let's go
|
| --- page ---
|
| fishing".
| smitty1e wrote:
| Punctuation has a braking effect on the reader.
|
| , ; : .
|
| If you're at a full stop, the second . feels superfluous.
| kube-system wrote:
| Then again, ellipsis marks are also a thing.
| taeric wrote:
| It is redundant because the punctuation is mainly there to
| indicate pausing or transitioning, but the quotes already
| indicate a change in voice, which is also a
| pause/transition.
|
| To that end, I am struggling to think of a time where the
| punctuation at the end of a quote really mattered. Even
| exclamations are less necessary, with the support of the
| surrounding sentance. Consider; they screamed "stop" to get
| the attention of everyone. And, "stop!" they screamed. In
| both, the change of voice to the quoted word is about the
| same.
| kazinator wrote:
| Yes; so the period _inside the quotes_ is redundant, and
| that one should be removed.
|
| The outside sentence _can continue_ after the quote; the
| terminating period outside of the quote is necessary if
| the sentence is ending there.
|
| We know that the quote has ended with the closing quote,
| and so we can agree on the convention that there is an
| implied period there, if the quoted material is a
| complete clause with subject and verb. If it needs some
| other punctuation like a question mark, then that is
| explicit.
|
| > He asked me "what time is it?".
|
| The ? ends the question, the . ends the sentence that
| contains the embedded question.
|
| The enclosing sentence can continue:
|
| > He asked me "what time is it?" but hurriedly walked
| away as I glanced at my watch.
|
| Now you positively, definitely cannot remove the period
| after "watch". Why would you remove it if the words "but
| ... watch" are deleted?
|
| This stuff is simply too important to leave in the hands
| of people who have never written a compiler.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| What benefit does the reader draw from being informed "this
| quoted phrase is a complete sentence"?
|
| It's not futile to reconsider conventions, no matter that
| demands may go ignored.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Floatingatoll said "It's not futile to reconsider
| conventions". This shows that's not a complete sentence,
| suggesting that you added a caveat or other clause.
|
| Also, your preceding paragraph highlights another issue:
| what if the sentence being quoted has different
| punctuation than the sentence it's placed in? You wrote a
| sentence that should end in a question mark, but the
| quote should end with a period.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Good illustration, but also brings into scope the [sadly
| disappearing?] ethical requirement of not misleading with
| abbreviated or out-of-context quotations.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| So, when a quoted sentence fragment terminates a
| sentence, the period should be outside?
|
| > Blah blah "Quoted sentence in entirety."
|
| versus
|
| > Blah blah "Quoted sentence fragment".
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Terminating the quoted sentence with a period is redundant,
| since the closing quotation mark also terminates it.
| croon wrote:
| Then you have no signifier for whether the quote is
| partial or not. Did you quote part of something someone
| said or the full sentence?
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| So would you suggest that it would make sense to never
| have punctuation before a quotation mark?
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Only when necessary.
|
| E.g.: '<<Are you joking?!>>, he said. The other replied,
| <<I'm not joking at all>>. They went on'.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| I agree with that, assuming there would be some
| indication if the quoted sentence wasn't complete.
|
| I'm just saying that the outer/quoting sentence needs its
| own punctuation regardless of what's going on in between
| those quotation marks.
| rocqua wrote:
| 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.
| mywittyname wrote:
| In that case, not capitalizing the word immediately
| following the quote will work as an indicator that the
| period is not part of the parent. This doesn't work in
| the case that the word following is a proper noun. But
| that's an edge case on something that doesn't really
| matter.
|
| I agree that maintaining punctuation of the quote is
| important for context. But outside of the quote, it
| practically never matters if there is a period or not
| after the quote. The reader may choose.
|
| > He looks up, "This is it." Bob says, gazing at the sky.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I don 't see why it is redundant_
|
| Can you construct a pair of sentences where the potential
| ambiguity would be meaningful and not trivially resolved
| with context?
| smeej wrote:
| Supposing the sentence weren't complete on the first page
| but the quoted one were, is this what you would expect to
| see?
|
| "...and also look ugly.",
|
| In that case, the convention of placing just a comma inside
| the quotation marks if the quoted sentence were complete
| but the quoting sentence were not seems much cleaner.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Yes that's exactly what I'd expect to see.
| He said "I came in with the tide.", but she wasn't
| listening.
|
| (which is correct according to my expensive British
| education) is _very_ preferable to He
| said "I came in with the tide.," but she wasn't
| listening.
|
| which has a full stop and comma next to each other and
| looks hideous.
|
| However, I do personally think the full stop inside the
| quotes is redundant and would remove it, unless it made a
| real difference to the sentence meaning.
| ycombinete wrote:
| .".
|
| This looks completely bizarre to me. I hope this never becomes
| a standard.
| SimeVidas wrote:
| She asked, "Did you find this on Yahoo!?".
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| This always made more sence.
|
| I used to love to write. That all ended in college, with
| English Instructors. I wasen't the only student either.
|
| There was so much emphasis on grammar, interesting writers just
| seemed to sound all alike. I enjoyed some of the papers that
| were read aloud the first few weeks. By the end of the courses,
| the papers were technically correct, but boring, and lacked
| imagination. I could see the enthusiasm drain from the students
| faces with every paper covered in red Sharpie corrections.
|
| I had one teacher that used to down grade me for not writing
| out numbers 1-10, and only using numbers for 11 on. I still
| don't know what's right, or care anymore.
|
| (I believe S & W recommends writing out 1-10.)
| CarVac wrote:
| Someone I know made a font modified so that the quotation mark
| goes directly over the period, which is a better way to combine
| the two.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Yes, that's better and more logical, because it also handles
| the case where the final punctuation of the outer sentence and
| quoted sentence is different, like when Dr. Johnson asked "I
| refute it thus?"!
| felipellrocha wrote:
| Finally someone who agrees with me. Don't want the double
| punctuation? Write a simpler sentence.
| mlindner wrote:
| That's how I already write messages. People can complain if
| they like.
| dspillett wrote:
| Same. It is like matching brackets. Two sentence ends, one
| quoted and one quoting, so two full-stops. And like putting
| exclamation/question/interrobang/other marks in the right place
| depending on who is using them (quoter, quotee, or both).
|
| Of course you can shorten your quote by one character and leave
| out the inner stop, and I'd say that was equally valid. I would
| tend to do that unless I want to make it absolutely clear that
| what I was quoting wasn't a run-on sentence that continued
| after that point.
| lostgame wrote:
| This rubs me wrong in all the ways and is aesthetically jarring
| as all hell to me.
|
| If I'm reading a book or essay and I come across this type of
| punctuation, it actually actively removes me from my flow of
| reading and causes me to stop for a moment and lose immersion -
| same with obvious spelling and grammatical errors.
|
| It's amazing how dependent our reading immersion is on proper
| grammar, spelling and punctuation.
| robocat wrote:
| > aesthetically
|
| I prefer to think it is what you are accustomed to, or
| habituated to.
|
| From these comments a number of people including me, prefer
| to use the _."._ form because we find that more aesthetically
| pleasing. I had discovered the _."._ form myself because I
| play with my punctuation (and words and grammar), and until
| this discussion I hadn't noticed others use _."._ *.
|
| I presume other other programmers play with syntax and
| punctuation too.
|
| * Note I have italicised _."._ and if you zoom on an iPad the
| full stops [US periods] change from squares to rhombusy.
| tradertef wrote:
| Same here. This is the way.
| leephillips wrote:
| As a programmer surely the concept of syntactic sugar is not
| unfamiliar to you.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| This is what I do as well. The article says it's "redundant and
| ugly" but I don't think it's redundant at all--it's unambiguous
| that "I refute it thus." is a full sentence quote that happens
| to come at the end of a sentence. It's _consistent_ and
| _simple_ , as opposed to a special rule that says you can elide
| the outer `.` if (1) the quote ends in a `.` and (2) the quote
| is the final element of a sentence.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| I logged in to write that it should be like this. Until the
| world changes, I use the British approach unless someone
| complains too much.
| Xen0byte wrote:
| Exactly, both approaches in the article are wrong, and this is
| the only way to write the sentence correctly. Each sentence
| needs to end in a punctuation mark, regardless of whether it's
| between quotes or not.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Just don't put a ended sentence at the end of something that is
| not yet a finished utterance.
|
| It's always possible to make a full sentence quotation after a
| colon, possibly using indentation: With just
| enough of learning to misquote. -- Lord Byron
|
| This can be even more explicit: "One whom it is
| easier to hate, but still easier to quote." --
| Alexander Pope
|
| Or you can also opt for inner quotation lightly altering the
| typography, like "quotation is the highest compliment you can
| pay to an author", which is actually an excerpt from the wider
| quotation: "Quotation is the highest compliment
| you can pay to an author. Perhaps the next highest is, when a
| writer of any kind is so considerable that you go to the labor
| and pains of endeavoring to refute him before the public, the
| very doing of which is an incidental admission of his talent
| and power." -- Anonymous
| Aeolun wrote:
| 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.
| soheil wrote:
| No, because you will still need to apply a special case to stop
| the recursion of putting a period after a period forever. If a
| sentence ends in a period then what ends the expression that
| contains the sentence and the period? Answer: another period
| because you can think of that expression as a sentence too. So
| you need a special case that says if there are going to be two
| periods next to each other then terminate the recursion.
| Similarly your .". asinine suggestion fails since it implicitly
| invokes a special rule, but is worse than the elegant special
| rule of just having one period.
| jjgreen wrote:
| _. "._ does look rather like a hairy Kilroy
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here
| Y_Y wrote:
| I bet we'll see a "hairy Kilroy" operator in the next Haskell
| library for meromorphic lens co-combinators.
| thewakalix wrote:
| Unfortunately, the quotation mark is not a valid operator
| character.
| lalaithion wrote:
| Technically, "I refute it thus" and "I refute it thus." are
| both valid quotations of a source that contains, in its
| entirety, "I refute it thus."
| recursive wrote:
| Is "rig" a valid quotation of "dirigibility"?
|
| Is "go there" a valid quotation of "never go there"?
| programmer_dude wrote:
| I feel the period inside quotes is redundant. The last
| quotation mark can signal both: end of quote and end of
| sentence within the quote. Though it gets complicated when
| there are multiple sentences within the quote.
|
| > Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot
| rebounded, "I refute it thus. I refute it thus".
|
| This looks "unbalanced" to me.
| erwald wrote:
| yep, I do mention this approach in a footnote, though it looks
| kinda awkward to me. maybe just because I'm not used to it.
| it's definitely not necessary for reading aloud, where it's
| enough to know that there's a punctuation there. but when
| reading silently it does make more sense.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I strongly agree.
|
| While we're on the topic, all the journals I'm familiar with
| require punctuation like full stops (aka periods) to be
| included in displaystyle maths expressions. There is a some
| logical justification for this, but it looks awful, and can be
| downright confusing depending on the sort of notation employed.
| It particularly irks me to see a spare comma tagged on to the
| end of a tensor calculus expression, that's supposed to be
| understood in the context of the surrounding prose, rather than
| the adjecant mathematical expression.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Footnote from the article:
|
| > 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 agree with you in principle, but aesthetics matter!
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Whenever I ask my English teacher wife about this sort of thing
| she reminds me that punctuation is rhetorical.
|
| If it's important to the writer that what is quoted be
| identified as a sentence then I agree with you, and I'm going
| to start using that construction in my writing.
|
| But when it comes to quoting words people say, is often good
| enough to just quote the words.
|
| When you store a command in a string, to you include the
| trailing newline? I usually don't, but it'll always depend on
| the use case.
| rekoil wrote:
| This is how I always do it.
|
| I don't care what other people think, this is the only thing
| that makes sense if you ask me.
| kevinmgranger wrote:
| It sounds like we need a ligature that puts the quotation mark
| directly over the punctuation.
| bloak wrote:
| > 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 large rock and said, as his foot
| rebounded: "I refute it thus."_
|
| This also works if the quoted sentence ends with a question or
| exclamation mark.
|
| It's a shame that punctuation of human languages can't be
| logical, but it seems that we're stuck with inconsistent
| requirements and messy compromises. Cases like the following
| really confuse and annoy me:
|
| _"On the other hand[,]"[,] she said, "we could wait till
| dark[.]"[.]_
|
| (Should that depend on whether the original spoken sentence
| would, if written, contain a comma after "hand"?)
| sbuk wrote:
| Typographically, the first comma is redundant, as it's
| implied in the break;
|
| _" On the other hand", she said, "we could wait 'til dark"._
| 0x000000001 wrote:
| > 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.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > There's no law that says you have to include everything in
| the quotation, right?
|
| Oh, if only languages worked so consistently.
| DESCRIPTION_OF_WHAT_WAS_SAID: "$(DIRECT_QUOTE.)".
|
| Then again, in programming things don't always nest either,
| since sub shell calls have all sorts of oddities in regards
| to escape sequences.
|
| Has there ever been a case of anything nesting nicely, be it
| in languages, programming, or any other medium of writing?
| Maybe XML? I'm not sure.
| arethuza wrote:
| I guess that's what XML namespaces were supposed to allow.
|
| Reality seemed to involve eldritch abominations like one
| system I encountered that had entire Base64 encoded XML
| documents embedded as attribute values in a higher level
| document and then this approach applied recursively....
|
| Edit: Of course, this wasn't XMLs fault - but for some
| reason a lot of XML used in the "enterprise" world seemed
| to be primarily designed to eat the soul of whoever gazed
| upon it.
| maybeOneDay wrote:
| > Has there ever been a case of anything nesting nicely, be
| it in languages, programming, or any other medium of
| writing? Maybe XML? I'm not sure.
|
| JSON?
| KronisLV wrote:
| Not quite, in practice you still occasionally stumble
| upon situations like these:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51974631/how-do-i-
| proper...
|
| Or this:
| https://github.com/spaceghoul/json_deep_parse#example-
| usage-...
| maybeOneDay wrote:
| I see what you mean, but the first appears to be a PHP
| bug (unless I am misreading?).
|
| The second, appears to be a tool for parsing a json blob
| which has been escaped and encoded as a simple string
| inside another json blob. That's certainly an interesting
| problem, and one that is likely to come up in a
| sufficiently complicated world - however it's not an
| issue with parsing JSON. It's an issue with parsing /any/
| data structure or language that may contain strings and
| as such seems unavoidable.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > It's an issue with parsing /any/ data structure or
| language that may contain strings and as such seems
| unavoidable.
|
| Except for a data format which would allow embedding data
| in a nested fashion without altering it in any way. For
| example: some_object_field: "some value"
| some_other_field: with_sub_objects:
| and_sub_fields: "with values" and_also_fields:
| """ which_allow_objects:
| embedded_as_strings: "without transforming the structure"
| which_both: "JSON and XML" have_somewhat:
| "failed to do" #""" control sequences should
| also be valid in the body, as long as there is proper
| indentation, a la Python # which could then be
| simply stripped for display, for example, based on the
| first """ having N indentation # then it would
| follow that the rest of the data entries have
| N+TAB_WIDTH, which could be simply stripped #
| also, processing the beginning of every line would be
| less expensive than iterating through the entire line in
| search of escaped \n or anything of the sort """
|
| Multi-line strings in JSON are also an embarrassment:
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/2392888
|
| As a consequence, the amount of parsing and processing
| that you need to do is really bad for performance. Of
| course, there are formats like YAML and TOML that go in
| the opposite direction - they try to cover all use cases
| and end up being overcomplicated.
|
| There are occasionally other attempts like JSON5 to
| improve things: https://json5.org/
|
| However those also oftentimes are not very popular,
| because there is just too much ecosystem that has been
| built around the older formats, like XML, JSON and even
| YAML.
| maddyboo wrote:
| > It's a shame that the punctuation of human languages can't
| be logical. s/the punctuation of //
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Lojban is a human language, even if it is not a natural
| language.
| mjochim wrote:
| Lojban also hasn't shown that it would retain its
| principles after years of broad day-to-day usage. And I
| dare speculate that it would not.
| laborat wrote:
| But what would you do if Dr Johnson was surprised, and you
| yourself were shouting, i.e.:
|
| _Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot
| rebounded: "I refute it thus?"!_
|
| AFAICS, the only way to render this faithfully is the way I
| just did. In other words, you really do need the punctuation
| both of the outer sentence and the inner sentence. By
| extension, the only logical approach for the original
| sentence would be:
|
| _Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot
| rebounded: "I refute it thus."._
|
| On a different note, might I use this moment to complain
| about American books not closing quotations, if they continue
| on onto a new paragraph, _and then opening them again_? I.e.:
|
| _John said: "I have two things to say._
|
| _" One of these things is this._
|
| _" The other thing is this."_
| dTal wrote:
| The quotation thing is irritating if you treat them like
| matched parentheses, but if you allow the opening and
| closing quotes to have different meanings, there is a
| logical interpretation. The opening quote is required
| syntax for the beginning of any quoted paragraph, so that
| the reader is reminded that we're still in an extended
| quote. The closing quote means "this person is finished
| speaking, and the next quote may be assumed to be a
| different person." The advantage is the streamlining of
| longer exchanges:
|
| _John spoke to Paul. John said: "I have two things to say.
|
| "One of the things is this."
|
| "What's the other?"
|
| "The other thing is this."_
|
| Even in the purest programming languages, we're happy to
| design special-case idioms that sacrifice perfect
| orthogonality for better human factors, provided there's an
| unambiguous parse. Scheme provides (define <identifier>
| <expression>) - utterly elementary. Yet defining functions
| by binding identifiers to anonymous lambdas is so annoying
| that an unneccesary and inconsistent second syntax is
| provided, (define (<identifier <args...>) <expression>).
| nicwolff wrote:
| Eh? Standard American and British usage is the same with
| regard to quotes that span multiple paragraphs. Given that
| it's understood that speakers can alternate without each
| quote being attributed, e.g.:
|
| _Bob said: "Any opinion on this, John?"_
|
| _John said: "I have two things to say."_
|
| _" What are they?"_
|
| _" One of these things is this._
|
| _" The other thing is this."_
|
| - how would you punctuate that? If you close each paragraph
| with a quote, then there's no way to tell who's speaking
| except to label each paragraph:
|
| _Bob said: "Any opinion on this, John?"_
|
| _John said: "I have two things to say."_
|
| _Bob asked: "What are they?"_
|
| _John answered: "One of these things is this."_
|
| _John continued: "The other thing is this."_
|
| And if you don't _open_ each quoted paragraph with a quote,
| it 's very hard to tell which paragraphs are quoted:
|
| _John said: "I have two things to say._
|
| _One of these things is this._
|
| _The other thing is this. "_
|
| _The third thing, he kept to himself._
| bottled_poe wrote:
| And what about when the quoted text is two sentences? Do we
| write a full stop for the first sentence, but not the second?
| odiroot wrote:
| 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.
| soheil wrote:
| /\."\./, /\."/
| odiroot wrote:
| I also did the same for parenthesis, so would need to
| double the cases :)
| soheil wrote:
| /\.([^\w])\./, /\.$1/
| enriquto wrote:
| why? can't it be solved by a sed script with less than ten
| characters?
| canadianfella wrote:
| Why don't you write that script for us.
| donatj wrote:
| I would vote omit the punctuation from the original quote
| unless it adds something of particular value, which that period
| doesn't seem to?
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I'm an American and was taught the British Style as correct US
| English. I didn't realize there were different styles - I just
| figured some folks got it wrong sometimes.
| lenocinor wrote:
| Somewhat related -- in my experience reading news articles
| online, it seems like more and more often I'm seeing the period
| migrate outside parentheses for full sentences. Has anyone else
| noticed this trend?
| simiones wrote:
| I think the example sentence contains the worst corner-case of
| such a system. In general, the . at the end of sentence is the
| least necessary punctuation mark, and quotations of neutral
| statements should just always omit it.
|
| For example, "this is how a neutral sentence should look like", I
| would say. I don't think "they saw a vase." looks good even in
| the middle of a sentence. However, "do I have a question?", or "I
| am exclaiming something!" do need their punctuation to make
| sense. Now, it's more ugly when you finish a neutral sentence a
| quote like "I am surprised!".
|
| Of course, there will be cases, especially in literature, where
| the . will actually add something to the emphasis of a quote. For
| example, "I have said it all." could be used to emphasize the
| period itself - but in those cases, jarring punctuation like
| `.".` or `.",` would actually help to emphasize the importance of
| the period.
| CRConrad wrote:
| > For example, "I have said it all." could be used to emphasize
| the period itself - but in those cases, jarring punctuation
| like `.".` or `.",` would actually help to emphasize the
| importance of the period.
|
| Even there, doing it like you did and putting the quoted
| sentence in the middle, not at the end, of the outer one looks
| about a gazillion times better
| kdeldycke wrote:
| 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
| somishere wrote:
| Logical aspirations aside, punctuation is largely meant to aid in
| reading.
|
| While some marks provide emphasis, most (other than suggesting
| connectivity) denote a length of pause.
|
| Punctuation (or lack thereof) that pulls you out of the flow of
| the reading is, IMHO, really not in the spirit of things ;)
| insickness wrote:
| If you were surprised that someone calmly said, "I can't do
| that," how would you write it?
|
| This would not convey the correct meaning: She said, "I can't do
| that!"
|
| This looks incorrect: She said, "I can't do that"!
|
| This looks incorrect as well: She said, "I can't do that."!
| ycombinete wrote:
| The middle one looks the best. I think the simple answer would
| be to convey it with words instead of an explanation point.
| kevwil wrote:
| I am American and can't help but wonder if this is a subtle
| British joke. This is just poor grammar based on how I was
| taught, so perhaps some Brits think it's cheeky to call it
| "American Style", like an American calling a dull stick a
| "British toothbrush". If so, well played. If not, no harm done,
| just don't use "American Style".
| drivers99 wrote:
| Not a joke. I thought the article was going to be about using
| single quotes vs double quotes. This article mentions that
| difference as being a reason typographers would put the
| punctuation inside vs outside the (double) quotes.
| https://style.mla.org/punctuation-and-quotation-marks/
| dhosek wrote:
| The British style works best with the Penguin style of using
| single quotes for the outer level of quotation rather than double
| quotes. Part of the reason we write "this." is for esthetics.
| Compare:
|
| "this."
|
| "this".
|
| 'this'.
|
| The middle version looks objectively worse than the first or
| last.
| scott_to_s wrote:
| The middle version really doesn't look worse. Perhaps you are
| just conditioned to read the US version and so your aesthetics
| have been changed by the familiarity with the US format?
| optymizer wrote:
| What makes it _objectively_ worse? Subjectively, I think it
| looks better than the first one and as good as the last one.
| dhosek wrote:
| The period gets pushed out into isolation by the quotation
| marks. In Verdana, which is the default font for text on HN,
| " is fairly narrow, but for other typefaces, the effect is
| quite dramatic.
| ponco wrote:
| 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.
| open-source-ux wrote:
| 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 :-)
| dcminter wrote:
| I'm British and have worked in the US so I've used most if
| not all of these forms.
|
| I'm not sure why the British one feels more logical to you,
| but I don't feel strongly drawn to either so probably it's
| more about familiarity.
|
| > Plus, the word 'parentheses' is a mouthful :-)
|
| There's a certain flow to the term "parenthetical" that I
| enjoy too! Alas I am entirely too parenthetic in my own
| writing and thus spend an annoying amount of time eliding the
| parentheticals :)
| flurdy wrote:
| Surely {} = squiggly brackets ?
| a9h74j wrote:
| When writing code by hand I literally just draw mirrored
| squiggles. (On inspection, only the first stroke at the top
| reliably indicates direction.)
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Logically, yes, but "curly brackets" is the only term I
| have ever heard used for these types of brackets. In
| Canada, which tends to use a lot of UK-isms.
| Izkata wrote:
| I work with UK and US people regularly, and despite not
| being an official name this is the only name for those
| characters that everyone has automatically understood.
| Accacin wrote:
| Huh, I'm from the UK and use the American versions. They
| American ones feel more logical to me. Probably all the
| programming books I read used the word 'parentheses' (:
| tsujp wrote:
| {} are also referred to as handlebars, I've had a few
| American colleagues use that.
| hibbelig wrote:
| I think the argument for the American style is aesthetics. I
| don't like it, but I can understand that there are people who
| prefer what looks better. TFA did not address this at all, which
| is a pity.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _the argument for the American style is aesthetics_
|
| Absorption of set theory should make one cringe at 'Abc def.
| Ghi jkl. Mnop "qrs." Tuv...'. The quotation marks are logically
| included in the section beginning with 'M', then visually
| escape it.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| (Sorry I was rushing and could not ponder more to complete
| the above as desired)
|
| ...It is as if one wrote,
|
| _[Abc def] [Ghi jkl] [Mnop (qrs]) [Tuv..._
| programmer_dude wrote:
| FWIW the British style looks more aesthetically pleasing to me.
| The American style reminds me of inappropriately mixed
| brackets: [(]). Cringe.
| blitzar wrote:
| > for the American style is aesthetics
|
| Why would you make a style choice to make something less
| aesthetically pleasing?
| programmer_dude wrote:
| I wouldn't and I don't think I am. The American style is
| not aesthetically pleasing at all. I think you misread my
| comment or replied to me accidentally.
| blitzar wrote:
| I am in agreement with you - I didnt even know this so
| called american style existed untill now, it makes no
| sense at all.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Oddly, perhaps, I wish programming languages _would_ allow or
| require mixed brackets when working with open- and /or
| closed-ended ranges.
| plandis wrote:
| The article is written by a German who probably learned British
| English, so in effect this is some guy telling people they should
| write in the way OP learned to write?
|
| How did this make it to the front page of HN?
| SerLava wrote:
| Call it "logical quotation" vs "typesetter's quotation".
|
| The American/British dividing line is extremely hazy, and only
| really cements the typesetter's quotations in the minds of
| Americans.
| teddyh wrote:
| _Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like
| parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if
| "Jim is going" is a phrase, and so are "Bill runs" and "Spock
| groks", then hackers generally prefer to write: "Jim is going",
| "Bill runs", and "Spock groks". This is incorrect according to
| standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas
| and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is
| counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with
| characters that don 't belong in them. Given the sorts of
| examples that can come up in discussions of programming,
| American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When
| communicating command lines or small pieces of code, extra
| characters can be a real pain in the neck._
|
| -- http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/writing-style.html
| tablespoon wrote:
| I just use American-style except in cases where it would
| introduce confusion, since it does in fact look better on the
| page.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Not if you are used to the British style.
|
| Here's something that might clinch it for you:
|
| Does this "look better on the page"?
|
| Does this "look better on the page?"
|
| The former must be correct, since the quote was not a
| question, and turning it into one would not be a fair
| quotation. Why should its status as a question change where
| we put the end of sentence marker?
|
| The same argument applies to the period, since the quoted
| phrase may not have included one.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Not if you are used to the British style.
|
| It's not a "used to" thing. The British style introduces
| white space gaps that don't look good. It's like ending a
| sentence with a space .
|
| > The former must be correct
|
| IMHO, "correctness" in the sense of "here's exact the
| character string that occurred in that other document, and
| anything else is wrong," is kind of a programmer POV. A
| looser sense of correctness is perfectly fine.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > The British style introduces white space gaps that
| don't look good.
|
| Sure they do, to me. The comma you inserted between the
| end of the quote and the closing quotation mark looks bad
| to me, because I have a strong expectation of the
| opposite. That esthetic feeling you have is how 'used to'
| manifests.
|
| Also the US spelling of 'esthetic' is ugly to those
| expecting 'aesthetic'. I'm sure the British spelling
| looks pretentious to Americans.
| pge wrote:
| Note that both American and British usage put a question
| mark outside the quotation marks. Only periods and commas
| are placed within the quotation marks in American style.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Nit: unless the question mark is part of the quote
| itself.
|
| He asked her, "do you prefer the American style?"
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| That's why we have backticks for inline code to resolve this
| ambiguity.
|
| Also, by this and the author's argument, shouldn't there
| actually be two periods? One inside the quote and one outside?
| (The author does address this, to their credit.).
| arp242 wrote:
| I've always written it in "British style" myself because that's
| what we do in Dutch and I never considered there might be
| another way to do things, and it wasn't until someone
| "corrected" me just a few years ago that I even noticed the
| "American style" exists, in spite of having read countless
| books and articles which use it. Even now, when reading
| something I don't really notice unless I pay attention to it.
|
| Based on this, I think it doesn't really matter, either in
| aesthetics or clarity.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Also, us Dutch get taught British English at school so it
| makes sense for us even in English.
| SllX wrote:
| It's an aesthetic 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.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| > It's an aesthetic choice in the end.
|
| AEsthetic is misplaced pedantry, since the word comes from
| Greek through German, rather than Latin.
|
| https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=aesthetic
| Igelau wrote:
| > 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 "cooperate".
| It shows up in 19th century publishing.
| arp242 wrote:
| I still see it in some publications on occasion, but it's
| rare. I often write it as "cooperate" myself as well; it
| clarifies that the o starts a new syllable and that it's
| "co-operate" rather than "coo-perate" with a single long
| o sound: it's just something you need to know. I find it
| regrettable that this has fallen out of favour, and
| especially with English becoming the de-facto world
| language I think there's some value in making the
| spelling and pronunciation closer when possible.
| leephillips wrote:
| It is regrettable. As far as I know, the _New Yorker_ is
| the only major publication that upholds the honor of the
| dieresis.
| [deleted]
| esquivalience wrote:
| This is all sorts of meta.
| yosito wrote:
| *metae
| mkaic wrote:
| *maetae
| jschulenklopper wrote:
| Meta is a four-letter word.
| montag wrote:
| I have to say, a career in software engineering has destroyed
| my enthusiasm for this typographically-motivated punctuation
| rule. And I had no idea it was just an American thing.
| ddek wrote:
| Interesting. I've always used the 'British Style', but in a
| mid-90s junior school in Scotland I was taught to always end
| quotations with punctuation. I guess I just rebelled.
| 7402 wrote:
| Grownups don't worry about this stuff. Just like they don't worry
| about which programming language style guide to use.
|
| If you're writing for an American audience, use American style.
| If you're writing for a British audience, use British style. If
| you're writing a journal article, or for a business, use whatever
| style everyone else there uses. If you're writing for yourself,
| use what you like.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| > Grownups don't worry about this stuff.
|
| Community guidelines[0]:
|
| - When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of
| calling names.
|
| - Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't
| cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer,
| including at the rest of the community.
|
| Insinuating that anyone who wishes to discuss this topic isn't
| a "grownup" seemingly violates two maybe three guidelines. Your
| comment without the first sentence would have been more
| constructive.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| jameshart wrote:
| I 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 people to disagree about that
| BugWatch wrote:
| 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
| rozab wrote:
| 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 realised it
| would be totally obvious. The inflection of the question is
| apparent from the beginning of the fragment (?), not just from
| the inflection on the last word. I knew this already, of course,
| but I didn't really _grok_ it, I guess because of the limitations
| of how we write out punctuation in English.
| john-aj wrote:
| Also, aren't questions marked primarily by word order rather
| than intonation in English?
| chromatin wrote:
| Re. Intonation: I actually distinctly remember my first grade
| teacher having us practice a rising tone at the end of a
| "question sentence". (US, 1980)
|
| Also I remember being taught quite rigidly the "A,Eric an"
| style of quotation-punctuation relationship, and I naturally
| rejected it from the beginning as illogical.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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.)
| Spivak wrote:
| Sentences of the form <some_statement>? with rising
| intonation are common and mean roughly <some_statement>,
| right? or <some_statement>, yes? There's no marker other than
| the intonation when spoken or the question mark when written
| to indicate that it's a question.
| gerikson wrote:
| The 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I do not understand why OP decided to use "English" which
| implies that people in Scotland and Northern Ireland might
| punctuate differently._
|
| Not sure about the author, but for several countries "English"
| is colloqualy used as a stand-in for British in general (and
| England for the UK), as those were the British they most
| commonly met.
| Veen wrote:
| It's best not to though, unless you want to annoy people from
| Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Most English people
| will consider it a sign of ignorance too. Beyond that, the
| "colloquial" use is simply incorrect.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Beyond that, the "colloquial" use is simply incorrect._
|
| Doesn't matter, language follows use, not etymology or
| geography. If a term has been established as something (in
| actual use) then it will be used, doesn't matter if it's
| not technically correct (same way "Indians" was used for
| centuries for Native Americans, and only fell out of use
| because of political concerns, not because it was also
| obviously incorrect and based on a misunderstanding of a
| whole continent).
| erwald wrote:
| uhm, good point, fixed. that was just a mistake.
|
| edit: for the record, I wrote the article and also posted it
| here. so I figured I could take the liberty of changing the
| title when sharing here.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Also the article's title is more juicy. HN sometimes goes
| overboard with editing titles. I guess it is a matter of taste.
| gerikson wrote:
| This is an interesting service to track this sort of thing:
|
| https://hackernewstitles.netlify.app/
| motohagiography wrote:
| I switch between the american style for persuasion, and the
| british style for precision. Am also Canadian, so a metanational
| approach is normal here. I also keep copies of the Chicago Manual
| and Strunk & White, which are useful for knowing which rules to
| break. Ain't never had much of a problem, consequently.
| brianmcc wrote:
| Lovely, the grammatical equivalent of where we put our braces,
| same-line vs new-line :-)
| CRConrad wrote:
| Fifty-fifty: Opening same, closing new. I'll die on this hill!
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| It is classic HN that this is one of the most active posts of the
| week!
| ur-whale wrote:
| About as good as I can think of a perfect example of a first
| world problem.
| transfire wrote:
| I imagine it depends on what you are trying to say...
|
| He said, "Will you?" I said, "No!"
|
| He said, "Will you"? I said, "No"!
|
| He said, "Will you?". I said, "No!".
|
| He said, "Will you?"!? I said, "No!" ;)
| cool-RR wrote:
| > There is no reason that there should be two different
| approaches to punctuation in the English language.
|
| If you want to go that route, there's no reason for there to be
| more than one language on Earth.
|
| Any attempt to research linguistics should respect the fact that
| people _want_ to be different from each other, and see that as a
| valid reason.
| trzeci wrote:
| Which makes no sense IMHO is to use "" instead of "". But it
| could be my OCD also.
| Y_Y wrote:
| It's all fun and games until you try to copy the "66 and
| 99"-style quotes from one place to another, or your "helpful"
| text editor automagically makes a mess of them. It's a pity no
| good ``asymmetric'' style ever really took off in English. I'm
| particularly fond of the French <<chevrons>>, and relatedly,
| !Spanish exclamations!
|
| [?]Why has not yet the opening interrobang received similarly
| wide adoption!?
| iggldiggl wrote:
| 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.
| joombaga wrote:
| 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.
| willhinsa wrote:
| I agree with you on !?, but differ with you on the "!?"
| and "?!" -- for me, the first character is the stronger
| marker of sentiment.
| rplst8 wrote:
| If I could roughly generalize the sentiment:
|
| _Are you just going to stand there and lie through your
| teeth?!_
|
| _Have you ever seen such an amazing sunset!?_
| Y_Y wrote:
| _Are you just going to stand there and tell me this isn
| 't the most amazing sunset you've ever seen!?_
| CRConrad wrote:
| So you're with joombaga, not willhimsa -- right?
| iggldiggl wrote:
| I'd tend towards willhinsa and yes, I'd rather switch the
| question and exclamation marks around in rplst8's
| examples.
| joombaga wrote:
| My thought is that punctuation "terminates" a sentence,
| and so the mark that's further to the right is
| "terminated" later, therefore it more represents the
| overall sentiment. The left punctuation mark is like a
| modifier; it's an adjective before a noun.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| I think I'd agree with that, too, i.e. the first
| character being the stronger marker.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I would argue that those two choices remain available to
| you, and that you can reach even finer levels of subtlety
| by using (or conspicuously not using) the interrobang.
|
| (Just don't use "??!" because that's a trigraph for "|".)
| coldtea wrote:
| OCD would use the former as those are more proper typographical
| quotes. Straight edge quotes is a computer text thing, not a
| typographical convention for regular prose.
| trzeci wrote:
| 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: ,quote' (single variant)
|
| - PL: 'quote' (british variant)
|
| - FR: <<quote>>
|
| - DE: >>quote<<
| rjsw wrote:
| 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.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| 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.
| rjsw wrote:
| > Also, French conventions like ... or spaces in between
| all punctuation, like you used in your first sentence.
|
| I'm a native English speaker, French is my second
| language.
| mzs wrote:
| Polish also has m-dash quotes for dialogue and nesting
| quotes that alternate Polish/inverted-French.
|
| https://culture.pl/en/article/pen-to-paper-mastering-the-
| qui...
| seszett wrote:
| French quotes, unlike most others, must also be surrounded
| by spaces (like the other punctuation signs that are made
| of two parts) like this:
|
| FR : << quote >>
|
| And all of the spaces except for the one after the ":"
| should be non-breaking spaces.
| Udo_Schmitz wrote:
| 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)
| bloak wrote:
| > >><< is allowed but mostly used in Switzerland
|
| I think it's <<...>> in Switzerland, while >>...<< is
| widely used in several countries, including Germany, and
| is the "main" system arguably only in Denmark.
|
| See https://jakubmarian.com/map-of-quotation-marks-in-
| european-l...
| Udo_Schmitz wrote:
| You are of course right and I edited my comment
| accordingly.
| cygx wrote:
| _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 :(
| Udo_Schmitz wrote:
| Yeah, Hacker News defaults to the Geneva font. Those
| quotation marks are not pretty :(
| szszrk wrote:
| "" is a simplification that fits well in keyboard usage and
| ASCII, but not always real language practices. In my mother
| tongue we use a ,,quote". Our characters in books speak
| starting from new line with a dash. But it's a different dash
| from simple minus sign we tend to use online, for simplicity.
| It's hard to actually use that on the Internet, but in books
| it's still _the_ way.
| daviddever23box wrote:
| I grew up in the United States and was taught that which is
| referred to here as the "British style"; not sure where this
| notion of an "American style" originated.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| I also prefer the common British use of commas over the oxford
| comma
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| What is described as the American style seems weird and never
| came into my mind. If I would ever stumble upon such a style I
| would think it's a typo.
| antattack wrote:
| US style is 'wrong' because it requires one to modify the
| original quote by adding punctuation within the quotes which
| delineate the quotation.
| coryfklein wrote:
| OP: When in Rome, do as the Greeks do because their way is
| better.
| gerikson wrote:
| The Romans held Greek culture in high regard. It was
| unthinkable for an educated man to not know Greek.
|
| And of course the "Greek" part of the Empire survived for a
| thousand years after the Western part petered out.
| est wrote:
| The American style is like putting closing bracket at the wrong
| indentation.
| Loic wrote:
| 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.
| kazinator wrote:
| Prefer 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.
| spleen wrote:
| Putting the period or comma within quotes (the US style) is like
| tucking your shirt in and then leaving a small part of it out.
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(page generated 2021-09-15 23:01 UTC)