Comment by jotaen
3 years ago
> Some people prefer the way a “space-en-dash-space” looks.
I think this isn’t just a matter of personal preference, but it’s also largely a cultural thing – in German, for example, the “space-en-dash-space” form is common.
This is true for a lot of other punctuation as well. For instance, in Germany, we quote „like this“ instead of “like this”. Whereas in Switzerland or France, it’s common to quote using Guillemets, as in «Hello there!». This style can also be found in German texts, though it’s less common than quotation marks, and it would typically be used »inversely«.
> in Germany, we quote „like this“ instead of “like this”
This is also the traditional style in Dutch; it's what I was taught at school. These days many just use "upper quotes". You can still find the traditional style in books and some newspapers, but others have switched over the years.
In traditional Ethiopian you would use ፡ as a word separator, and ። as a full stop. Over time, people have started to "just" use the space as a word separator. There's some Wikipedia pages that mix both styles; for example on [1] you can see ፡ being used for the first three paragraphs and then it switches to a space. I rather like being able to see the evolution of language/typography on a single page.
[1]: https://am.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%8A%A0%E1%88%9B%E1%88%AD%E1...
Interesting. I also see a few periods and a lot of colons with a line over them.
What do they mean? Just curious.
Comma, question mark, stuff like that. There's an overview at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amharic#Punctuation
1 reply →
Since you're quoting France, it's worth noting that there, double punctuations (?:!;) are preceded by a half-space (although in practice it's always a full space). Likewise, guillemets are surrounded by spaces (the space inside the guillemets might be a half-space, I'm not entirely sure). So it would be « Hello there ! »
Easy way to identify francophone writers. They always have a space in front of their colons, exclamation marks, etc.
Ahhhhh, thanks for that! I'm German speaking, and I must admit I questioned the intellectual capacity of some people I conversed with, due to that. In German there is even a slur for it: "Deppenleerzeichen" (fool's whitespace). Now that clears things up.
6 replies →
An unbreakable half-space, to be pedantic (though in this case the pedantry makes sense: you don't want your punctuation mark to end up on the next line)
And for extra fun, while the French word for space (espace) is masculine gender (un espace) for most its meanings, in typography, it's feminine (une espace).
Using an en-dash like this – you see – is the usual British style.
The unspaced em-dashes—like this—is typically American.
I consider a crime not to have any spaces between em-dashes and adjacent words. Traditionally, I guess, there were spaces of different sizes. Hair-thin spaces were typeset before and after em-dashes --- that's what I do in LaTeX using (\,). But, because different sized spaces have never been a thing on the Web, let alone plain text, people have preferred to not use any spaces, for some reason.
HN normalizes thin and hair spaces to normal spaces, so they can't be demonstrated here, but there is an example on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Hair_spac...
1 reply →
I wouldn't call it a crime, but a convention. In Europe it's an n-dash with surrounding spaces, in the US is an m-dash without spaces. For me, the former is nicer, but crimes are maybe a tad more serious.
I think Medium uses hairspaces. And of course there’s some automation since all writers seem to get that thing.
There ends my trivia about that unusable site.
This is precisely what I do religiously in my latex: M-dashes are always {\,---\,}
Unspaced em & en dashes tend to stay glued to the surrounding words when there should instead be "word" wrapping at one end or the other of the dash. It is a crime against text aesthetics. We have met the criminals, and they is us - software types.
Not to mention, ems and ens are not Ascii and thus not strictly kosher.
And BTW, all of these can be found on the new AZERTY keyboard :
https://norme-azerty.fr/en/
(BÉPO version also exists)
That looks well thought out. I use a QWERTY layout with similar reasoning applied to the Option/AltGr levels (but entirely different in specific placements) and I routinely type various dashes and quotes without conscious thought, any more than I consciously think about Shift-level punctuation.
In Spain the RAE (equivalent to the Oxford Dictionary) recomends «this», but you will almost never find it except in professional printing. They are not in the keyboard, so everybody uses "this".
It's a shame when technology fails us in this way - I just mean that computers are created to be our tools, and if we want to easily write «this», we can make that happen. If we only have people with this mindset (computers are our tools) in the right places.
I'm sure that's a ton of fun for anyone trying to write a natural language parser. LMAO using the end brackets as start brackets and vice versa.
> trying to write a natural language parser.
I assume we're done doing that, that task is finished ;)
I get you mean chatGPT has solved the problem, but it feels as if its solved the problem without answering the deep questions. We still don't really get how the brain does it or the answer to any of the deep linguistic questions, instead we get two systems capable of language which no one understands. But at least its useful! So maybe there are natural language parsers yet to be written, for nothing else than to finally test our understanding of natural language parsing.
Actually we quote „like this“.
There are many other quote styles - my language uses „these signs” (which we call "ghilimele", similarly to French "guillaumets").
EDIT: Seems HN is eating up the right signs... You can see them on Wikipedia here, they essentially look like two small commas: https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghilimele
Oh, you quoted correctly, but the display of the right quotes is messed up. They should go from upper left bottom to upper right top, but instead show as upper left top to upper right bottom.
Yeah, so we could conclude that punctuation is not just a cultural thing, but – to make matters worse – depend on the whims of the font maker as well.
3 replies →