Date: Sun, 4 Jun 2000 12:25:36 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Punctuation conventions Message-ID: <20000604122536.A85628@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <8havj4$2pdj$1@bigeye.mips.inka.de> References: <006d01bfcc13$1b573c10$2969a0d0@leviathan> <3936A504.9741.9963DB1@localhost> <8h8snk$1irg$1@bigeye.mips.inka.de> <20000603111107.B30249@wantadilla.lemis.com> <8havj4$2pdj$1@bigeye.mips.inka.de>
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On Saturday, 3 June 2000 at 15:01:24 +0200, Christian Weisgerber wrote: > Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote: > >>> American English quotating marks are ``text'', the British seem to >>> prefer `text'. >> >> I don't see that difference. Typically it's `` and '' for both. > > I just checked a few paperbacks (Iain Banks, Arthur C. Clarke, > Stephen Donaldson, Greg Egan) typeset in the UK, and they uniformly > use `...' for first level and ``...'' for second level quotation > marks. All from the same publisher, perhaps? I've just grabbed about 8 books printed in England. Only two of them had the single quote convention, both Penguins. An older Penguin book had double quotes. > The only two Australian printings I have at hand both have ``...''. > >>> German has >>text<< or ,,text``. >> >> Well, ,,text''. > > Sorry, but it really is ,,text``. Or, to give a better description: > > 66 > . . . > 99 That's not `` in my book. > Books almost universally use inverted guillemets nowadays. I took a look at about 8 German books. A surprising number of them used inverted guillemets, but the others either had the 99/66 convention, or in one case (Frank Theiss, ,,GÄa'', printed by the Druckhaus Neckator in Stuttgart) literally ,,/'' (no curvature, no thickening at one end). In Fraktur it's pretty much that as well: no curvature, slight thickening at the ends you indicate. Duden agrees with any of these conventions, including the French. > The type of quotation marks above is mostly limited to magazines and > newspapers. As mentioned in discussions on de.etc.sprache.deutsch, > some publishers apparently also use guillemets without inversion > <<...>>, but that is rare, at least in Germany (might be different > in Switzerland). Yes, that's what Duden says. > Remarkably, c't and iX use `...'. What, you still read iX? c't seems to use `...' and ,,...'' for different things, the latter (in the editorial "...") for quoted speech. Look at page 256 of 8/2000 for an example of ,,...''. Greg -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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