From owner-freebsd-chat Sat Jun 3 19:56: 1 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from wantadilla.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.80]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9D80137BD15 for ; Sat, 3 Jun 2000 19:55:51 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from grog@wantadilla.lemis.com) Received: (from grog@localhost) by wantadilla.lemis.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id MAA85671; Sun, 4 Jun 2000 12:25:36 +0930 (CST) (envelope-from grog) Date: Sun, 4 Jun 2000 12:25:36 +0930 From: Greg Lehey To: Christian Weisgerber Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Punctuation conventions Message-ID: <20000604122536.A85628@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <006d01bfcc13$1b573c10$2969a0d0@leviathan> <3936A504.9741.9963DB1@localhost> <8h8snk$1irg$1@bigeye.mips.inka.de> <20000603111107.B30249@wantadilla.lemis.com> <8havj4$2pdj$1@bigeye.mips.inka.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0pre2i In-Reply-To: <8havj4$2pdj$1@bigeye.mips.inka.de> Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Saturday, 3 June 2000 at 15:01:24 +0200, Christian Weisgerber wrote: > Greg Lehey wrote: > >>> American English quotating marks are ``text'', the British seem to >>> prefer `text'. >> >> I don't see that difference. Typically it's `` and '' for both. > > I just checked a few paperbacks (Iain Banks, Arthur C. Clarke, > Stephen Donaldson, Greg Egan) typeset in the UK, and they uniformly > use `...' for first level and ``...'' for second level quotation > marks. All from the same publisher, perhaps? I've just grabbed about 8 books printed in England. Only two of them had the single quote convention, both Penguins. An older Penguin book had double quotes. > The only two Australian printings I have at hand both have ``...''. > >>> German has >>text<< or ,,text``. >> >> Well, ,,text''. > > Sorry, but it really is ,,text``. Or, to give a better description: > > 66 > . . . > 99 That's not `` in my book. > Books almost universally use inverted guillemets nowadays. I took a look at about 8 German books. A surprising number of them used inverted guillemets, but the others either had the 99/66 convention, or in one case (Frank Theiss, ,,GÄa'', printed by the Druckhaus Neckator in Stuttgart) literally ,,/'' (no curvature, no thickening at one end). In Fraktur it's pretty much that as well: no curvature, slight thickening at the ends you indicate. Duden agrees with any of these conventions, including the French. > The type of quotation marks above is mostly limited to magazines and > newspapers. As mentioned in discussions on de.etc.sprache.deutsch, > some publishers apparently also use guillemets without inversion > <<...>>, but that is rare, at least in Germany (might be different > in Switzerland). Yes, that's what Duden says. > Remarkably, c't and iX use `...'. What, you still read iX? c't seems to use `...' and ,,...'' for different things, the latter (in the editorial "...") for quoted speech. Look at page 256 of 8/2000 for an example of ,,...''. 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