Comment by tsimionescu
3 years ago
The unification of minus, hyphen, en-dash and em-dash is entirely natural. Back when I was in school ~25 years ago, in newly-non-communist Romania where ASCII was at best a distant idea, no one taught any difference between these signs. We did have different names for the minus sign and the dash used in writing (and Romanian uses a lot of dashes), but that's it.
We were taught to use the exact same sign for compound words, for other Romanian orthography, for separating words at the end of a line, and as one option for introducing parenthetical clauses - like this. And it was the same sign we used for minus in math class. A slightly longer dash was often used for one particular purpose*, though even that was not explicitly stated, and you wouldn't get lower marks even in calligraphy classes for using shorter dashes instead.
* Romanian uses these longer dashes when representing lines of dialogue, especially in literature, as in:
-- I would like to go to the mall.
-- That sounds wonderful!
The typographical distinction between a minus, minus-hyphen, hyphen, and en-dash can still be helpful to screen reader software: https://www.csun.edu/it/news/accessibility-tip-dashes-and-hy..., https://www.stylemanual.gov.au/grammar-punctuation-and-conve...
Some screen readers are better at parsing this than others, but if there's a typographical option that's more specific, it's typically appreciated.
On the other side of it, the suggestion in the article to use dashes for numeric ranges isn't ideal for parsing.
> The unification of minus, hyphen, en-dash and em-dash is entirely natural.
Maybe in Romanian, I can't comment on that.
In English, we have three different words in common usage: hyphen, dash and minus.
No-one – including school-children – would write no—one or school—children. You might get −1 for that.
> * Romanian uses these longer dashes when representing lines of dialogue, especially in literature, as in:
I've seen that in English literature. Jeff Noon's Needle in the Groove uses that style IIRC.