Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2000 11:11:07 +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: <20000603111107.B30249@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <8h8snk$1irg$1@bigeye.mips.inka.de> References: <006d01bfcc13$1b573c10$2969a0d0@leviathan> <3936A504.9741.9963DB1@localhost> <8h8snk$1irg$1@bigeye.mips.inka.de>
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On Friday, 2 June 2000 at 20:00:20 +0200, Christian Weisgerber wrote: > Freddie Cash <fcash@bigfoot.com> wrote: > >> This may just be for Canadian French, but in my 13 years of study and >> use, I've never seen a space before a '?' or a '!' or any other >> punctuation mark. > > Randomly picking three (European) French books from the shelf, I > see a space being used before '?' and '!' in two of them. You can > also observe the practice over in the fr.* groups or quite often > in English articles posted by French speakers. I've just checked 7 books I could find easily. 5 had a full (m) space before ":" and ";", two a partial space. Two had a fractional space before "?" (approximately ¼ m space), the others had no space. >> As for the different `opening and closing' marks, what was the point to >> those?? I always found them to be very annoying and to break the flow of >> the type. ``just looks wrong'' > > Excuse me, but what's the point of the American quotation marks? They're used to quote literal speech. > Why are *they* different? From each other? So you can differntiate between open and close. German has the same concept, except that the opening quotes are (used to be, anyway) at the bottom of the line: ,,Lass' es sein'', sagte er. > And who introduced the bizarre concept of repeating the opening > marks at every new paragraph? Just looks wrong. Good question. But it's been there a while. > More to the point, if you expand your horizon a bit, you'll learn > that every language (or even major national variation) has its own > typographic conventions. Asking about their point and declaring the > ones you happen to be used to as the right way is profoundly silly. Indeed. > American English quotating marks are ``text'', the British seem to > prefer `text'. I don't see that difference. Typically it's `` and '' for both. > The French use << text >>, German has >>text<< or ,,text``. Well, ,,text''. But this is what you were complaining about earlier. 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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