From owner-freebsd-chat Fri Jun 2 12:31: 0 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mail.inka.de (quechua.inka.de [212.227.14.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0E38237BFF1 for ; Fri, 2 Jun 2000 12:30:46 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from daemon@mips.inka.de) Received: from bigeye.mips.inka.de (uucp@) by mail.inka.de with local-bsmtp id 12xx9Y-0002Vr-01; Fri, 2 Jun 2000 21:30:44 +0200 Received: (from daemon@localhost) by bigeye.mips.inka.de (8.9.3/8.9.3) id UAA52088 for freebsd-chat@freebsd.org; Fri, 2 Jun 2000 20:00:21 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from daemon) From: naddy@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) Subject: Re: Punctuation conventions Date: 2 Jun 2000 20:00:20 +0200 Message-ID: <8h8snk$1irg$1@bigeye.mips.inka.de> References: <006d01bfcc13$1b573c10$2969a0d0@leviathan> <3936A504.9741.9963DB1@localhost> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Freddie Cash 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. > 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? Why are *they* different? And who introduced the bizarre concept of repeating the opening marks at every new paragraph? Just looks wrong. 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. American English quotating marks are ``text'', the British seem to prefer `text'. The French use << text >>, German has >>text<< or ,,text``. French and Russian introduce direct speech with a dash. And so on. If you look closely, you may notice such subtle differences as opening curlies having their knob at the top or bottom end, etc. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message