Talk:Quotation mark, non-English usage

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The following is a copy of Talk:Quotation mark up to the point when this page was split off. Abtract 20:27, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Discuss split/merge/etc. at Talk:Quotation_mark#Split_this_page — Omegatron 22:42, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Angle quotes in Germany

Maybe one should add that the angle or guillemet style qutation marks are used in German book printing by some publishers. Only they are used the other way around, the points showing toward the speach, as in

»Liebes Fräulein,« sprach Faust, »darf ich's wagen?«

-- Anon

Is there something special about those publishers that make them do things different from the mainstream German?
--Menchi 08:29 26 Jun 2003 (UTC)
No, in fact most German and Austrian publishers use »...« in books. low99 hi66 is more common in newspapers. By my observation that is. Crissov

We could also add the use of the opening dash, with no closure, just a comma leading onto the speaker identification, as used in some European languages. I don't know enough about it to attempt it myself, and haven't got examples around. Made-up example:

-- Je suis fou, disait-je.

--Gritchka

[edit] Space before question mark

Since this page focuses on puncuation, I added a space before the question mark in the French sentence (Est-ce que vous...). This is standard before question marks, exclamation points, colons, etc.

--Stephen24

Good call, although it must be a non-breaking space, so that the question mark doesn't fall at the start of a line. —Michael Z. 2006-09-27 02:41 Z

[edit] Quotes in Portugese

I have Portuguese as my first language and I have absolutely no idea of why the "«?»" signs are listed on that table as default for Portuguese. Those marks are never used on this language (believe me, I know). I would've promptly corrected that, but I'm not sure anymore. If this is indeed wrong, the info for other languages on that table might be wrong as well. If anyone knows what this is all about, it'd be nice to have some input (or have the article fixed, if that's the case). Mackeriv 14:30, 13 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The table is based upon [1], which cites two German books from 1970 and 1986 as sources. Any of these as well as my conversion could of course have flaws or be outdated. Corrections, if based on facts, are of course always welcome. Crissov 19:23, 6 May 2004 (UTC)
The Hungarian one is switched too, so these infos are a "bit" misleading. --Szajd 20:13, 2004 May 9 (UTC)
Several of those entries seem mistaken. The references on which that information was taken from could be indeed reliable, but they don't reflect the reality of those languages. Perhaps that's the way of the correct grammar, but that's not how people use it. I feel that the double/single quotes are the most famous use of the quotation marks worldwide (at least today). – Mackeriv 02:25, 10 May 2004 (UTC)
The problem seems to be correcting itself, however, as more people update the quatation marks for the language they're familiar with. I changed the Italian one, for instance, and Chinese, Japanese and Hungarian all seem to have recently been updated. --Asbestos 14:47, 8 June 2004 (UTC)
I'm going to switch the Turkish one, as I've never saw "«…»" used in a Turkish text in my life. MonsterOfTheLake 16:57, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Actually, going back to the Portuguese point (since this section is titled ‘Quotes in Portugese [sic]’ after all), using « and » is quite common in many materials (not only published, but also on the web) in Portugal, and I myself have seen them quite a number of times. Since Mackeriv is Brazilian, that might account for his not knowing that, since such marks are indeed never used in Brazil. Psi-Lord 06:55, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Since this is the English Wikipedia and for ease of reading, I believe this article should be split into "Quotation mark, English language" and "Quotation mark, other languages". Abtract 15:39, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

03, 2004 Jun 14 (UTC)

And the rendering bug in Safari also affects the Japanese/Chinese quotes, shifting the line slightly up. It's not as noticeable, since it doesn't cut into the table border. It doesn't seem to affect it in Firefox, because the row is tall enough anyway. --Elektron 07:07, 2004 Jun 14 (UTC)

Update: Apparently, this is correct behaviour, so it's not going to change. However, the problem is still with the stylesheet specifying "line-height: 1.5em" (the CSS spec states that this is to be calculated into absolute values, e.g. pixels, and that will be inherited). If, instead, you specify "line-height: 1.5", things work properly. Of course, since it's a <TH>, we could just add TH { line-height: normal} to the stylesheet (or then the height of the table cell would be too big). --Elektron 03:09, 2004 Jun 16 (UTC)

[edit] Quotation dash in Spanish

Hello, I am Spanish, and I find the quotation dash section incomplete: in Spanish, particulary in books, dialogue is always indicated with dashes. If some text in the paragraph is not part of the dialogue it is 'escaped' with dashes, as indicated in Polish, but the punctuation and spacing is different:

―¡Oh, cielos! ―exclamó Levin―. Creo que hace ya nueve años...
―Eres bueno ―señaló Oblonsky, riendo―. Y tú me llamas...
―Estoy aburrida ―dijo ella.

The 'escape' dashes work some like parenthesis, and has the same punctuation rules: space outside, no space inside and punctuations outside. But if the non dialogue text ends de paragraph then there is not ending dash.

Maybe someone car rewrite this, since my English is not as good as it should be :-(

--195.16.143.65 11:24, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)

In many Spanish books the qutoation dash (“raya”) comes in two typographical variants, although the official names for them I’m not sure ... Anyways, the above could be written like this:

—¡Oh, cielos! –exclamó Levin–. Creo que hace ya nueve años...
—Eres bueno –señaló Oblonsky, riendo–. Y tú me llamas...
—Estoy aburrida —dijo ella.

I’ll review the books I have to see the exact use on it, although since no native speaker has ever given me clear rules on the rules for quotation marks in Spanish (the difference between «», “”, ‘’, —, – since I've seen all used without consistency), I can’t guarantee RAE-level of authority in what I find. Matthew Stuckwisch 17:10, 25 September 2005 (CST)

[edit] Table of Quotes

The footnote "3. In Switzerland the same quote signs are used for all languages: French, German, Italian" under the table of international quotation marks doesn't appear to make any sense. What does it mean? --Asbestos 2004 31 Oct

Actually there are not just three but four national languages in Switzerland and all use '«ch»', despite differing habits in other countries (« fr », »de«, „de“, “it”). Feel free to rephrase. Crissov 23:35, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The table seems to be influenced by English language, rather than punctuational logic. There shouldn't be any "Double" and "Single" columns, only "Standard" and "Alternative". Double quotes are standard for English and single quotes are the alternative quotation marks. While for other languages the notion of single vs double quotation marks never comes into play and just makes no sense. Though perhaps an extra column would be needed for comments on languages that don't fall into, or exceed the standard/alternative quotation pattern. --Delicates 08:07, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'll suggest using "outer quote" and "inner quote" instead. Or even more labels, all languages might not have anything to put under a specific label, and the table will be wider, but clearer. --fbjon ^^ 4649 12:51, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Good suggestion. I'll change it to "outer" and "inner" right now. That will be far more useful than "double" and "single". Unfortunately, I don't know which languages are "double" on the outside, and which are "single" on the outside. I hope someone else can fix that up later. --DavidCary 21:39, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Footnote 1 does state for English "In longer quotes the leading quotation mark is repeated in front of each line". This should refer to paragraphs instead of lines, shouldn't it? -- 24 Apr 2005

yes --Taejo 18:24, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

In Afrikaans: the "standard" is to use baseline doubles to open and high to close (both point the same direction as English close quotes). However, I have not seen anyone do this in many years (I learnt that system in 5th grade, and our readers then used it, but since then only in old books). Today, high english-style quotes are by far more common (probably in part because we use US keyboards in South Africa). --Taejo 18:24, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Font & display problem

The font Wikipedia uses (Arial?) renders “, ” and " exactly the same in the 10 pts main text. This makes it impossible to see that Swedish and Finnish uses only right quotes, as opposed to English, so I've added a paragraph about these languages. --Salleman 12:09, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

To be precise, this is what happens on a Windows box. On a Mac (which has a much more complicated font rendering engine) the difference is subtle but noticeable even at 10p. Your comment remains valid, of course! Arbor 13:01, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Corrected transliteration

I took the liberty to change nijyuu kagikakko, which is an unpreferable transliteration, into nijū kagikakko (standard Hepburn transliteration). Nice article by the way. --129.187.214.85 16:32, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC) ("FAR" at de.wikipedia.org)

[edit] Finnish single angular quotation marks

The table giving quote signs for several languages states that, in Finnish, single angular quotation marks (›…›) are used inside double angular quotation marks. This is a practice I've never seen--I've only observed single quotation marks (’…’) there. Could anyone give a reference to a publication that has this practice? | hyark 08:53, 2005 May 23 (UTC)

[edit] Spanish long quotes

When the quote spans for more than one paragraph, even when it's noted by raya sign (—), the second and following paragraphs start with a closing quote (comillas de cerrar: »). Should I add this to the table? (It's a little long for a footnote and my English is not so good... Maybe somebody will do it?). --84.42.165.49 22:07, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That is curious. In English, the rule seems to be that only the closing paragraph gets a closing quote; all other paragraphs have only an open quote! I'll add both notes. Hopefully others will confirm these two unusual rules. --Chinasaur 00:33, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Skal got it right. Thanks. --80.250.2.193 12:36, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] CJK quotes

The comments about Japanese using curly quotes was simply wrong, so I fixed it. I was under the impression that Chinese uses curly brackets (‘ ’, “ ”) for horizontal text, and corner brackets (「 」, 『 』) for vertical text, like Korean, but the article currently doesn't say so. Could a Korean or Chinese speaker confirm/deny/expand on this? —Tokek 23:38, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The NHK style is to use curly quotes in the German style. But angle brackets are more common. I suspect NHK are conforming to older style rules. Zeimusu | (Talk page) 08:03, August 1, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] New table of quotes

I much prefer the old table rather than the new one because it was less cluttered.—Tokek 07:13, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

First note that there doesn't seem to be any single verifyable source for this information. It has been updated by readers with first-hand knowledge. I would like to have added a third column to differentiate "common practice" from "formal style", but I wouldn't know how to categorize the ambiguous "standard" for each language. Feedback on the idea would be appreciated.
Now, I was able to change the table when I came to the realization that differences in quotation style can depend more on region than they do on language. I had expanded it hoping that people who edit the page would not overwrite pervious work. For instance, I would think that Taiwan and Hong Kong could easily have different opinions about what is standard, so a Cantonese person would only edit his line. (See my version.) However, my changes were collapsed (to the then new one you link), so I don't know if the region expansion idea would have done any good. The regional information was then just useless clutter. Davilla 12:04, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

Okay, the reference number links are now appearing. Clicking on it works, however they still don't correspond to each other visually. For example, clicking on 18 takes me to note #2. This is still confusing and needs a bit of fixing. Also, do we need a new column for this? Maybe?—Tokek 21:05, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Grave accent.

The character ` is a grave accent, even though it has been often abused as a open quote. I've made a few changes to reflect that, and straighed some quotes in what is supposed to be computer code.Zeimusu | (Talk page) 08:06, August 1, 2005 (UTC)

do you have any sources that the character ` was meant to be a letterless grave accent originally? and what exactly is the point of a letterless accent in the first place for that matter aren't accents supposed to be above letters Plugwash 14:43, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

I'd imagine it dates back to typewriters when you just wouldn't advance the printhead, so the ` and the a would be typed in the same spot, thus producing à (it's the same principle behind Unicode's combining diacritics, or the early method of bolding text on a computer, which was A[backspace]A, making A (as if a printhead typed twice on that spot)

[edit] Bulgarian quotes

Bulgarian quotes are only „“ but not ‚‘. There is an additional rule that adjacent closing double quotes are reduced to only one closing quote. Alternative quoting is «» but it is used very rarely. Both these quotes (double and angle) are without spacing. I prefer someone else to make these changes, but I'll do them if noone has time. —Ognyan Kulev 13:03, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Romanian

According to the Romanian Academy, 99 quotes are used both for start and ending of the quote („quote here”). It's not 99 for start and 66 for ending like the article says.

[edit] Quote endquote

Does anyone know how proper it is to when reading "nostalgia", for example, whether it is proper to say "quote, end quote, nostalgia," or if this should instead be read, "quote, nostalgia, end quote." It doesn't seem that this article makes any mention of end quotes whatsoever. Theshibboleth 03:39, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

  • The way I see it, saying quote, end quote, nostalgia makes the word seem as written ""nostalgia. It should be said quote, nostalgia, end quote, making the word seem as written "nostalgia". — JIP | Talk 13:01, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Found comments

The following commentary was included in the article in HTML comments. ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 16:40, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

windows-1252 is a common character set for English, could discuss that further, but there are lots of other Windows character sets too.
yes there are but the entire windows-125x series http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/MICSFT/WINDOWS/ has curved quotes in the same places...


References: [2] Jeremiah 27:1-11; 29:1-28, 30-32; 34:1-5; Ezekiel 27:1-36

[3]

[edit] History of the glyphs

When were quotation marks first used? Why are there so many different kinds? How did they evolve? — Omegatron 04:13, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

That's a great question. I'd looked into this a bit but couldn't find much information online, so left it to a more knowledgable contributor. From what I've found, quotation marks used to be written in the margin of a page, kind of like a symbolic designation of blockquotes. Davilla 21:21, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Split this page

I would like to see the English usage and non-English usage in separate articles.Abtract 16:18, 3 October 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Other languages and scripts

There's no mention of the Arabic language or script. What about the South Asian scripts? Thai? Anybody know? SDC 12:41, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Polish qoutation marks

In Polish we would use »such« marks inside of a quotation rather than «such». Botev.

[edit] Quotes within Quotes: Discuss

For quotes within quotes, spaces are unnecessary; when you start a single open quote (i.e. ‘) within a double open quote (i.e. “), it is understood that at if the single end quote ends with the sentence, there will be three end quote marks placed after the comma or period (i.e. ,’” or .’”) and before a colon or semicolon (’”: or ’”;). Thus, a space between the ending single and double quotes (i.e. ’ ”) is superfluous, making it look awkward. Besides, where is documentation in proof of this claim? Search Google and you will see examples supporting a no-space rule. Also, you will never see a newspaper or magazine use a space between ending single and double quotation marks. Perhaps in academia, but never otherwise. This looks awkward: (“‘awkward.’ ”) and so does (“ ‘awkward.’ ”); but this looks fine: (“‘fine.’”)

English: “‘Discuss.’”

[edit] Original research/references

I've tagged this article as original research. Perhaps I've overreacted and should just have tagged it as unreferenced. But it seems to me that all the wonderful, patient discussion on this page fails to cite any proper references, and is hence dubious. mgekelly 12:36, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't think you are overreacting. I think the target for this page should be that the reader should be confident in the advice. As a British person with some competence in punctuation, I am troubled by the various statements of British use, which we would not recognise as such. I did some looking around and I can understand the problem, a lot of the information on the web is American and casually states that there are some British English rules, yet these don't seem to conform to what I understand as the rules. Also, I know that there is not a good understanding of what the rules are supposed to be, so it is difficult to distinguish between proper and common usage (I avoid the word correct deliberately). Spenny 17:09, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
Another point I don't see made strongly enough here is that there is rarely a single set of rules governing usage, particularly such fundamental usage as punctuation. Surely the punctuation rules applied to a scholarly journal are not the same as those enforced by a newspaper editor, a mass-market book publisher, a teacher at a public school, etc. Is one set of rules correct, and the others simply debased forms? Is there some Platonic superset of rules that constitutes ideal puncutation? I think not. This kind of objectivist position was strong in the Victorian era but has less credibility today. Punctuation is, like other aspects of language, a living thing representing the consensus of practitioners. Trevor Hanson 00:22, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
Y?ou sa!id "it!. :P" --Ryan Heuser 15:25, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Marking a foreign vocabulary

Is it correct to use German or English quotation marks around 'Auto' when writing "The German word ‘Auto’ means ‘car’."? - 80.141.241.19 14:30, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Generally, use the punctuation of the ‘outer’ language so the example above is correct, as is Das englische Wort „car“ bedeutet „Auto“. Zeimusu | Talk page 14:53, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Scandinavian quotation-dash usage

Besides the languages already listed in the "Quotation dash" section, Swedish and Danish occasionally use the dash this way. Swedish, in fact, has an informal nickname for the quotation dash: pratminus (literally "talk-minus"). (I considered adding those facts to the section itself, but couldn't find a suitable place; any suggestions?) --Ingeborg S. Nordén 17:58, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Swedish quotation marks

According to the third version of "Typografisk Handbok" (Typography Handbook), by Christer Hellmark, 2000, ISBN 9173246069, there are three ways to use quotation marks in Swedish:

  1. ”quoted text, with a ’quote in the quote’”
  2. »quoted text, with a ’quote in the quote’» (traditional)
  3. »quoted text, with a ’quote in the quote’« (recommended, today more common in Swedish than the above)

The article does not list Swedish as using the third way of quoting, which would've been true 50 years ago. Hellmark also suggests that the use of endash for quoting in Swedish implies the quote isn't exact, while using any quotation marks means exact quotes.

[edit] How are punctuations used in quotes that are followed by citations?

This could be included in this article because in scientific writing, this situation is often encountered. For example (observe the full-stops used here), which is the correct way to include the following citation -- "cold-blooded but prefers to eat hot-blooded animals." in the following sentences?:

The iguana is said to be "cold-blooded but prefers to eat hot-blooded animals." (Simon and Garfunkel, 1970).

OR

The iguana is said to be "cold-blooded but prefers to eat hot-blooded animals" (Simon and Garfunkel, 1970).

Note that the full-stop is within the quotes and outside the quotes here. Which is the correct

As far as I'm aware - either...let me explain - because the "." is in the quotation marks, it is self-contained and doesn't actually end the sentence. If it were to be the end of a sentence, you need to add another fullstop at the end anyway - ie: The iguana is said to be "cold-blooded but prefers to eat hot-blooded animals.". If it's a fullstop at the end of a quotation before the quotation marks end, it doesn't actually end the whole sentence - just the sentence within the quotation marks. Put in the fullstop if there is a fullstop after the word "animals" or don't is there isn't - and put one at the very end of YOUR sentence (after the citation) as well. Although I'm English and use the British rule - I doubt it matters so much that someone of another nationality would think it's completely, utterly wrong. --Andyroo316 18:44, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
I guess you didn't notice the split but it may be better to take this thread to Talk:Quotation mark. I have posted a copy there to help Abtract 19:41, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
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