Talk:Quotation mark, non-English usage/archive 1

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

The following is an archived copy of Talk:Quotation mark up to the point when non-English usage received its own article. The archive was made today.Abtract 00:04, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Contents

Grammar?

Can we have a little more useful grammar and style advice and less programming trivia in this article? The massive discussion on "straight quotes" vs "curly quotes" is really strange.

Well, this lemma is quotation mark, not quoting or quotation. Christoph Päper 12:50, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
It's a bit odd to call an encyclopaedia headword a "lemma", particularly when you're discussing a title that uses two lexemes.Grace Note 02:55, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Logical punctuation

I have corrected a very common misconception, which is that in Britain logical punctuation is used for quoted speech. It is not: Britain (and Australia and all others that follow British style) put the comma illogically within the quotation, same as American. Thus:

'Good morning, Dave,' said HAL.

I was astonished to find how common the misstatement is on authoritative-looking web pages discussing style and punctuation. These must be American, without access to whole libraries full of British books; or if British have accepted it without looking. I in London have just walked across to a library and opened numerous novels from numerous publishers. They all use the above style, never the following logical style:

'Good morning, Dave', said HAL.

However, this only applies to whole quoted speech like that. For small fragments, such as the following, Britain does use the logical style:

Also called 'plain quotes', they are teardrops.

Gritchka 09:46 29 May 2003 (UTC)

That surprises me as I was taught and have always used "logical" punctuation. I have always seen the above as an Americanism. I personally would write:

'Good morning, Dave.' said HAL.

Unless there was some continuation

'Good morning, Dave,' said HAL, 'and what a fine day it is.' he continued.

of course I could be unique in this, it is a long time since I learnt English at school.

The above is wrong, in that the full stop is the end of the sentence. If you want to use "he continued" after, a comma would be used, as 'Good morning, Dave,' said HAL, 'and what a fine day it is,' he continued.

The full stop in the dialogue is after “and what a fine day it is.” It ends with “he continued” because the preceding quote was a continuation of the first. —Frungi 01:44, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Me, I use logical punctuation everywhere, regardless of language. Most likely it's because of my analytical mind, but not having English as my first language might have something to do with it too, but I've never seen the bleeding point in non-logical punctuation. It's a counter-intuitive aberration due to hysterical raisins, and should be discouraged. — JIP | Talk 13:11, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The Chicago Manual of Style reads in section 5.13:

"The British style of positioning periods and commas in relation to the closing quotation mark is based on the same logic that in the American system governs the placement of question marks and exclamation points: if they belong to the quoted material, they are placed within the closing quotation mark; if they belong to the including sentence as a whole, they are placed after the quotation mark." -- 11:48, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The article stated that logical punctuation for periods and commas in American English is becoming 'more acceptable' due to the influence of computer science. Although this type of usage may be seen more often for this reason, it seems hardly close to 'acceptable.' No manual of style or language guide would label it so. Therefore I've changed the copy to reflect that this type of usage can be seen more often, but removed the implicit blessing of the word 'acceptable.' 70.145.102.253 06:54, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Well, the American Chemical Society style guide prescribes the "logical" style, so it is definitely acceptable if you choose to follow this guide (as you should if you want to publish an article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, for example). However, I haven't seen any evidence that the increasing popularity of this style has anything to do with computer science. Itub 18:38, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

It had always been my understanding (but I have no citations to back it up) that we owe much of our current punctuation practice not to grammarians, nor the guidelines of logical "rules" like those stated here, but to typographers – who established conventions based on the physical appearance of glyphs on the page. In particular, I understood that having commas and periods preceding a close-quote was for typographic reasons. Although it was often an illogical usage (and annoying for rendering precises character sequences such as 'abc' as distinct from 'abc,' as we do when dealing with computers) it was my understanding that normal publishing practice was to follow this format in all cases – regardless of the meaning of the text. This was typographer's folklore that I learned before the age of desktop publishing. It might be wrong, of course. Trevor Hanson 00:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Typographers follow different conventions in British and American publishing. Different publishers' house styles also dictate their practices (although hopefully the styles are developed by both editors and typographers in collaboration). —Michael Z. 2006-09-27 02:40 Z
Absolutely. My points were that there isn't such a thing as a national standard punctuation, and that typographers (primarily 19th century I would say) played a substantial role in establishing the various standards in use today (at the same time they standardized usage for hyphenation, em dashes, en dashes, standard leading, etc.). In other words, there were no National Puncutation Boards defining "logical style" rules. The rules evolved through usage, making many forms correct – and making it awkward to be didactic about 'correct' style. (I'm sure that most participants here share this view; but one sees the occasional "In the U.S. this way is correct.") Trevor Hanson 21:38, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

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

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

Scarce quotes

I found it "ironic" that the sentence discussing scare quotes, used bold in just the same manner that scare quotes are often used, to emphasize a word or a phrase:

"Another important usage of quotation makes is to indicate or call attention to ironic or apologetic words, in a tactic sometimes called scare quotes."

But that's why I came to this page. What should I do when I want to introduce word or phrase that's technical jargon? Isn't this an normal case where people will surround a word or phrase with quotation marks? After the crash, the "hackers" then "bootstrapped" the system. "Lose, lose," they exclaimed! This isn't a great example, but this is emphasizing a word and setting it apart as a term of art, but it is not irony, nor apologetic. Is this use of quotes superfluous?

(Sorry if I "rambled.")

--Jerryasher


"My name is Juuitchan."

Why is it standard in English to write the sentence "My name is Juuitchan.", but not to write "My name is 'Juuitchan'."? --User:Juuitchan

I think the later means your name is not legally Juuitchan, which happens to be true. So tire your fingers out and use the later method! :-) --Menchi (Talk)â 01:41, 14 Dec 2003 (UTC)

That's just the way we do it. This is an apple. That is a heteroscedastic distribution. My name is David. Perhaps quotes would make more sense, but it's too late to change now. --DavidCary 21:39, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Since English uses an initial capital to denote names, adding quotation marks is pretty pointless. --Salleman 12:05, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

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, Eglish language" and "Quotation mark, other languages". Abtract 15:39, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Of course there may be some who would argue that an additional "n" would add value to my previous thought.Abtract 15:42, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Rendering bug in Firefox

I don't know if it is a browser issue or table issue or page source issue, but I get this in Firefox 0.8 under XP. The straight quotes, curved quotes, and german curved quotes are affected, the other two look fine.:

Fix it if you know how. - Omegatron 23:17, May 5, 2004 (UTC)

I use the same browser (on XP). Mine looks fine. --Menchi 05:08, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

There is a similar bug in Safari, where the row height is correct, but the text is shifted up so it cuts into the top of the table. It only occurs in monobook, and occurs because of "line-height: 1.5 em" in the style sheet. In both cases, the render sees "line-height: 1.5 em" first (in the body), and then converts it to pixels (I think), and then sees "font-size: 3 em", and forgets to change the line height to compensate. Further investigation shows that it processes the entire tag at the same time, so it doesn't matter if line-height appears before font-size (in the same tag). The workaround is to add "line-height: 1em" to the style in every line, but (IMO) the browsers should be fixed, not the article.

For example, <div style="line-height: 1.1em; font-size: 3em;">A<BR>B<BR>C</div>:

A
B
C

But <div style="line-height: 1.1em;"><div style="font-size: 3em;">A<BR>B<BR>C</div></div>:

A
B
C

The effect is more drastic in Firefox. Safari seems to render the table differently, possibly because it looks at the font size to determine the row height, but decides it can't shift the bottom of the line below the bottom of the cell, so the top sticks out instead. --Elektron 07:03, 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)

"Frequent overuse" heading

Isn't the new material under this heading essentially a duplicate of what I wrote about emphasis quotes under "Emphasis and ironic quotes" about quotes for emphasis, except with a sarcastic tone? Why do we need this twice? -- Tyler 18:14, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

erm. Potentially - feel free to edit mercilessly! Mark Richards 18:20, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

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)

When to start a new line or indent?

Do you have any guidance on indentation and when to start a new line. For example A) below seems more logical to me (start new line with change of speaker), but B) looks better.

Which is better. A)

<long paragraph> ....and he walked into the room and said ‘ Hello, how are you.’
‘Fine thanks,’ was her reply.
‘Do you really mean that?’ he said
They then went for a walk.

or B)

<long paragraph> ....He walked into the room and said
‘Hello, how are you.’
‘Fine thanks,’ was her reply.
‘Do you really mean that?’ he said
They then went for a walk.

--Mervynl 09:24, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

B isn't correct because it fragments the sentence in the first paragraph. It is possible to use a colon before a quotation block but it is certainly not preferred in this case. There are other guidelines on quotations, such as not quoting two people within the same paragraph and keeping long quotations as separate paragraphs, but I'm not 100% versed. Davilla 18:44, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Manual of Style entry under discussion

The Manual of Style for English Wikipedia currently forbids all other quotation marks than typewriter quotes. The argument for this was based on the encoding system (latin-1). When English Wikipedia moves to 1.5 real soon now that argument is nullified, so I would like to allow real quotes on English Wikipedia (they are allowed on other Wikipedias, like the German and French ones).

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (Quotation marks and apostrophes). Arbor 17:52, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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.

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)

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...

I thought double quotes were "British"

The start of the article claims that it is British to use a single quote and American to use a double quote.

In the words of Victor Meldrew: "I don't believe it." I was certainly educated to use double quotes in handwritten work in the 60's and 70's, and use them naturally in type-written work too. A quick skim of the BBC website shows some inconsistency, but double quotes are common. In the printed word, it may be that there is a difference, but in fundamental rules of grammar, I would say that it is untrue to say that there is a difference between the British and American use.

I am also troubled that it is suggested that it is British to write -

He said, "This is a quote".

I was taught, and use -

He said, "This is a quote."

and would never write:

 He asked, "Is this a quote"?

It is an area for confusion, as there is an illogic, and I may not have been paying attention at school, and may not even be consistent myself (see minor edit!). I am happy that there are different valid rules, but it seems wrong to attribute them to being British vs. American. I'd like to see an British source cited for this assertion of how British English works. I note that this has been raised before, and yet what I believe to be a mistake remains. Reluctant to make such a fundamental edit without a discussion.

The way I see it, punctuation marks go inside quotes when they're actually part of the sentence being quoted. Thus, I'd write:
He said "This is a quote."
because he said a complete sentence, and its contents were:
This is a quote.
However, I'd write:
He said it was a "quote".
because he called it a
quote
and not a
quote.
Words and sentences quoted by other speakers are not quote.s, they are quotes, so they should be called by the correct spelling. — JIP | Talk 13:08, 21 September 2005 (UTC)
It's a far more complicated set of rules for punctuation, but if we just consider common speech marks (using quote in the example was a bad idea, and I don't disagree with your example) then the British convention is not to use a "logical" method - and there are a lot of subtleties and exceptions that it is unlikely that the common man gets them right. I'm not overly worried about a complete punctuation lesson - Eats Shoots and Leaves is the place for that sort of thing - but it is wrong to state that these rules are different due to the national boundaries stated - it is continuing an urban myth it seems.

I think I have found a pretty neat source to show that there is nothing modern about the British use of double quotes British Library Online Gallery. If you look at The Original Alice you will see that Lewis Carroll used double quotes. I will amend the page appropriately shortly unless there are any firm objections. Spenny 19:45, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

Redundant translation of quotes

You know how people wiggle their index and middle fingers in the air when trying to implicate what they are saying aloud is in quotes? Well, I've seen people actually do that in writing. Such as (makes rabbit quotes with fingers) after a sentence. What's wrong with simply putting the text in quotes? Why translate your writing into speech and then back to writing? — JIP | Talk 13:04, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

Doing the hand-signals is redundant, and any decent speaker should be able to use intonation to qualify the quote, even the sarcastic way that this is often used - it's a geek thing. In the context of informal, jokey writing, then there is no reason to ban such things, but it clearly is an affectation and doubly redundant, not a useful piece of grammar. Spenny 19:50, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

Reported Speech vs. Quotations

In reading around the subject, I realised that some of the British vs American rules seemed to be due to the differences between rules for quotation and rules for reported speech. I don't think this would be common knowledge, but the various sources that pop up on the Internet do suggest there is a difference - so it is suggested that to be proper in British, a quote used to be single quotes and reported speech was always double quotes, though the sources acknowledge that this rule is not generally applied. Also there is a suggestion that punctuation rules differ between reported speech and quotations (presumably on the grounds that reported speech is under the writers control so readability is given precedence over accuracy). Spenny 14:03, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

Avoiding curly quotes in e-mail

"[English curved quotes] are preferred in formal writing and printed typography, but in e-mail and on Usenet they should not be used because they are not present in the ASCII character set (which is the lowest common denominator for data exchange between computers)." [cite]

Is anyone using a mail program that doesn't handle quoted-printable ISO characters properly? I'm thinking curly quotes are safe in e-mail, and if there's no objection, I'll update the text to reflect that. —Michael Z. 2005-10-10 18:31 Z

They are pretty safe nowadays though ofc there may be problems with very old mailers or those who insist on reading thier mail by telnetting into a pop server. I've rewritten that peice to make it more neutral. Plugwash 16:25, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
Ever tried sending and receiving e-mail on a mobile phone? It may soon change but not all moblie phones can handle the fancy stuff yet. Jimp 19Dec05

American English versus British English but what about the rest of us?

As far as I know every dialect of English but the American one uses logical style. Am I not right? If this is the case, let's have it made clear in the article. If it's not the case, let's have a more thorough coverage. There is more to English than the sum of British and American English.

Specifically what style do they use in Canadian English? One might assume that they used the logical style just as they use Commonwealth spelling however the U.S. may exert a stronger influence than I might imagine and that there exists two differing punctuation styles might slip the notice of even the proudest calling-a-zed-a-"zed"-and-not-forgetting-the-<u>-in-"colour" Canadian. Jimp 19Dec05

I find it rather POV to call it "logical style", and at any rate you're mistaken; Canadian English follows the US usage. I had never seen the single quote style until I first read a British-published book (probably a Doctor Who novel knowing me). PurplePlatypus 08:08, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
Canadian English uses American style. There are rare holdouts. – joeclark 14:48, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

HTML/XHTML paragraph needs clarification

It would be rather nice if someone would take a look at the discussion of quotes in HTML/XHTML in the "Emphasis and irony" section and translate it into English. What's there currently probably means something to the editor who wrote it, but it really needs to be "dumbed down" for the masses. --BRossow 14:53, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Biblical references

"Sometimes, quotations are nested in more levels than inner and outer quotation. Nesting levels up to five can be found in the Bible."

Anyone have a reference for this?

--babbage 07:34, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

The references are hidden in comments in the source of the page should anyone doubt the claim. Including them on the page cuts into the flow of the article. Would it be appropriate as some sort of footer?Davilla 21:29, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

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

[3]

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)

Split this page

There's a lot of information here on the representation of these marks on computer systems. That's excellent, of course, since it couldn't be included in most style manuals. However, in my mind there is still that distinction between the proper use of quotation marks in writing and their graphical representation. I want to split this page into language-related style information, for English particularly, and machine-related typographical information. There is minimal overlap, I think, but I'm soliciting suggestions. Davilla 20:05, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

The distinction is between the basic typographical information--the types of glyphs, applicable languages, their spacing, etc.--and their correct use in text--when and how to quote. The first is a comparison of glyphs across languages, while the second is a style guide. Can anyone suggested a name for the latter, something along the lines of the use of quotation marks, or quotations in text? Davilla 23:45, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

  • Quotation marks (usage), perhaps? --InShaneee 03:48, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
There's also a related article at Quotation, which seems to be about the literature context. I'm thinking perhaps the "language-related" usage could find a home at Quoting, which currently looks more like a placeholder than the disambiguation page it's trying to be, whereas Quote seems to be genuine. Something to remember in any case is to ensure there are enough cross-references connecting these related if individual articles. --TuukkaH 12:25, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
  • I am quite happy to see the split suggested by Davilla above and I would like to see the English usage and non-English usage in separate articles.Abtract 16:18, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Computer languages

The page currently lists php as using single/double straight quotes interchangeably, but php interpolates double-quoted strings. [4]

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)

Polish qoutation marks

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

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.’”

日本語：『「協議をしなさい。」』

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)

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)

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)

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.

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

The above is an archived copy of Talk:Quotation mark up to the point when non-English usage received its own article. The archive was made today.Abtract 00:04, 8 November 2006 (UTC)