Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2000 13:44:54 -0700 From: "Freddie Cash" <fcash@bigfoot.com> To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Punctuation conventions Message-ID: <3937BA56.27397.1330A84@localhost>
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> > 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. <funny>Eh, everything the Americans do is different and without sense. That's why I prefer the Canadian way. :-) </funny> Personnally, I prefer the opening quotes ate the head of subsequent paras, as it keeps the flow of the conversation/text in my mind. But, I am a very visually aesthetically inclined reader. :-) > 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. Whoa, whoa, whoa there. I wasn't criticising, I was asking a question? I (still) don't know the reason (read: point) for the different quote marks. All quoting systems I've seen have been symmetrical, with the exception of the ``text'' system (and now the German one below). All I was asking was why is it that way? I know that every language has it's peculiarities and every typo system does too (not to mention every alphabet), but, that's now what I was aiming at. Read above. > 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. Freddie Software Support Co-op School District 73 fcash@sd73.bc.ca To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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