Jump to content

Talk:Quotation mark/Archive 9

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Archive 5←Archive 7Archive 8Archive 9

“Double low„ quotation marks.

There's no information on the “double low„ quotation mark, usually (it seems to me) used in larger print quotations or when quoting aphorisms in particular. It is unicode “U+201E Double Low-9 Quotation Mark„ (use of double low quotation marks solely for emphasis ;-) ) Nagelfar (talk) 08:33, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

AFAIK, this mark is only used in other languages than English, and then only as an opening quotation mark. It is mentioned as such in Quotation mark, non-English usage.  --Lambiam 07:54, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Commas in Lists with Quotation Marks

Suppose I have a list of phrases/words that I use in quotation marks, how would I punctuate them? Example:

Aladdin's three wishes were: "fast cars", "green gold", and "more food."

or

Aladdin's three wishes were: "fast cars," "green gold," and "more food."

So this isn't a great example, but it was the only one I could think of on short notice. Perhaps the answer is just to italicize the phrases... --71.172.37.93 (talk) 07:38, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Quotation spanning several paragraphs

This subsection just repeats information from the introductory paragraphs, with less detail but a longer example. Is there any reason we can't lose it/merge it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.157.199.120 (talk) 02:40, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't see this information mentioned at all in the introductory paragraphs or anywhere else in the article, except once, in that subsection. What sentence(s) are you referring to in the introductory paragraphs?  --Lambiam 07:35, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Logical punctuation in interrupted full sentences

Is it true that the following sentence is correct under both the US and the UK systems?

"HAL," noted Frank, "said that everything was going extremely well."

It seems like it should be

"HAL", noted Frank, "said that everything was going extremely well."

-- since the first comma is (presumably) not part of the quoted material.

--Truth About Spelling (talk) 08:39, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

A good writer wouldn't do either! —Tamfang (talk) 07:10, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Not sure I agree, but are you saying we should remove the example? Truth About Spelling (talk) 08:19, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

The meaning of quotation marks has flipped

It seems to me that the "history of quotation marks" on the Wikipedia page on quotation has omitted to mention the very most important thing about the history of these marks. That very most important thing is that the function of quotation marks has completely reversed itself since the idea of copyright has evolved. This reversal occurred at around the middle of the 19th Century. What the marks previously meant was something like <<What is inside these marks is public material, not my own, it is merely something that I have at one time or another copied into my Commonplace Book, and which I now am copying from my Commonplace Book into the body of what I am here writing.>> At that point, since what was within the quotes was not private material, there was no necessity to acknowledge anyone’s private ownership, and thus we frequently see the material appear without any footnote or other attribution. At the earlier moment, copyright was something that inhered in the publisher of a text, not in the author of that text. The quotation marks earlier delimited something that was public material to which no personal claim was being made, rather than something that was private and proprietary material. Then at about the midpoint of the 19th Century the situation got stood on its head. In the development of capitalism, copyright had become something that inhered in the originating author of the text rather than in its publisher. The copy right of the publisher had become something that was derivative of the author, something which the printer needed to purchase from the writer. It was this change that caused the function of the quotation mark to reverse itself. Instead of delimiting something that was public material to which no personal claim was being made, they gradually came to delimit something that was private and proprietary material, that the author of the text had not himself or herself originated. At that point it made sense to not only indicate that what was inside the marks was private and proprietary material, but also, to acknowledge the author who had created that string of words. We can see this in Thoreau’s published writings. He seldom indicates who the author was, of some string of words that he is copying out of his Commonplace Book into the text of something he is writing. At that time, no-one would have expected him to do this. The function of the marks was something like <<Don’t quote this as originating with me; I didn’t originate this particular snippet.>> [Austin Meredith, kouroo@brown.edu] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.148.216.105 (talk) 20:40, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

"Typing quotation marks on a computer"

The writing in this section is rather weird.

I mean, I start reading it, and it begins:

Although they are so common in writing, quotation marks and apostrophes are surprisingly difficult to type on a computer keyboard, especially with a Windows keyboard.

And I think, "Really? It's that hard to hit shift and the quotes key at the same time?" And then I read on:

The majority of people have no idea how to type them, instead using typewriter quotation marks and apostrophes (" and ').

And then I think, "Okay, so it's talking about the difference between those two types of quotation marks. But isn't a 'typewriter quotation mark' STILL a quotation mark? I know how to type a quotation mark even if it's just a 'typewriter quotation mark.'" As far as I can see, the article makes no mention beforehand of the difference between curvy and straight marks in normal writing, or the typewriter kind or the other kind, and then all of a sudden it's telling me I don't know how to type a quotation mark. (I know this stuff is discussed at the glyphs article, but there should still be some kind of context here if you're going to be talking about the different kinds. Also, I don't think I'm the only person who wouldn't instantly realize that "glyphs" means the different symbols I'm talking about here. I'm sure it's not that well-known a word.)

And then there's the chart, which does tell me how to make the "other kind," which is interesting to know. But does anyone actually use that kind in normal writing? With the hitting-five-keys-every-single-time (if you're on Windows, anyway)? The preceding paragraph, where it talks about "the majority" (which I'm assuming is total OR), gives the impression that those in-the-know actually use this tactic every time they use quotes.

And THEN it talks about the smart quotes and the dumb quotes, which I think should be discussed earlier, because most people who read this are going to be thinking, "Wait, this doesn't make sense, because when I open Word and start typing I don't need to do all this stuff to make the quotes show up all curvy."

I would try to rewrite the section myself (and I actually started an attempt), but I don't really have the subject matter expertise to be clear, especially when it comes to that question of whether typewriter quotes are REAL quotes and if there's another name for the non-typewriter kind. I just wanted to note these observations in hope that someone else with more knowledge may understand and agree with them and make improvements. Propaniac (talk) 16:09, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

What about some people online who use * as a quotation mark for certain rhetorical phrases like so called freedom and *democracy* ???173.28.241.5 (talk) 05:09, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
As far as I know, that's usually meant to indicate bold type, not a quotation. The article on the asterisk [1] agrees. 88.113.90.46 (talk) 22:59, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

When a person speaking quotes someone else.

What are the rules about someone who is speaking quotes someone else?

Would it be

"In chapter 8 of his Art of War Sun Tzu states "Therefore, the general who knows the advantages of the nine changes knows how to use the troops,"" said the professor. (each quote being closed)

or

"In chapter 8 of his Art of War Sun Tzu states "Therefore, the general who knows the advantages of the nine changes knows how to use the troops," said the professor. (with just one closing quote)

or

"In chapter 8 of his Art of War Sun Tsu states 'Therefore, the general who knows the advantages of the nine changes knows how to use the troops,'" said the professor. (single quotes around the Sun Tzu quote and double quotes around the professor's actual words)?--BruceGrubb (talk) 10:00, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

The second of the three is definitely wrong. The first is potentially confusing. So almost all style guides stipulate the third. Or, of course (especially in British English), single quote marks for the professor and double for Sun Tsu. It looks a bit awkward with a single quote mark immediately followed by a double, so sometimes (in typeset copy) a thin space is inserted between them. SNALWIBMA ( talk - contribs ) 10:17, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
According to Judith Butcher (Cambridge) the correct style (at least in British English) is: 'In chapter 8 of his Art of War Sun Tzu states "Therefore, the general who knows the advantages of the nine changes knows how to use the troops," ' said the professor. --Kleinzach 01:59, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

The image File:Chinese quotes.jpg is used in this article under a claim of fair use, but it does not have an adequate explanation for why it meets the requirements for such images when used here. In particular, for each page the image is used on, it must have an explanation linking to that page which explains why it needs to be used on that page. Please check

  • That there is a non-free use rationale on the image's description page for the use in this article.
  • That this article is linked to from the image description page.

This is an automated notice by FairuseBot. For assistance on the image use policy, see Wikipedia:Media copyright questions. --14:12, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

English translation of German example

In the German and Austrian section, the example:

    Andreas fragte mich: «Hast du den Artikel ‹EU-Erweiterung› gelesen?»

is translated into English as:

    Andrew asked me: ‘Have you read the article “EU Enlargement”?’

The idiomatic translation of Erweiterung in this context is expansion, which can identify, for example, increasing the membership (of an organization) or increasing the geographical area (under the control of a nation-state or an organization of nation-states).

Expansion suggests increasing the size of something outward from some central area or volume past existing boundaries. Although expansion can occur in any direction(s) (or in all directions), in context, it often implies increase in some horizontal direction(s). Etymologically, the root of Erweiterung is weit, presumably cognate of English wide, and both weit and wide also, in context, often suggest horizontal distance.
Grosbach (talk) 18:13, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

The point is well made, but I see that the EU itself calls it "EU Enlargement": ec.europa.eu/enlargement/index.htm. (And so does the Wikipedia article Enlargement of the European Union, but then I suppose that doesn't count.) So, while I am happy to accept "expansion" is valid, I'd tend to say we should use the term that the EU itself uses, if there is no particularly strong reason to do otherwise. And, since this article is about quotation marks and not the things inside them, I don't really see that there is strong reason to change it (but am happy to be persuaded otherwise). Si Trew (talk) 19:48, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Romanian alternative quotation marks

According to the Romanian Academy the quotes are „…”, but many newspapers, magazines and books use „…“ (like in german). Shouldn't the alternative be „…“ and «…» and not the standard reversed? I can scan multiple examples if you need any. (Full disclosure: That's how I've been taught in school, that's how I see books and that's how I modify my keyboard mapping. The Romanian Academy can go fuck itself!) I'm confused, what do you mean? Vegfarandi (talk) 23:40, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Scandinavian quotation marks

I know that oftentimes, Danish uses the same quotation marks as Swedish and Finnish. Also, Icelandic often uses the horizontal bar in novels, rather than quotation marks. How should we indicated this Vegfarandi (talk) 23:40, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Yiddish

We should put the Yiddish ones. I'll look for them.--Shikku27316 (talk) 01:51, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

Estonian quotation marks should be first „…” not „…“ (99 & 99) not (99 & 66)

Different combinations are used in estonian, but The Institute of Estonian Language uses and suggests „…” as do many newspapers and publishing houses. [1] [2]

2A01:E35:8A17:DE10:3C2A:AFA7:5D43:C3F1 (talk) 19:57, 8 April 2013 (UTC) Sander

References

  1. ^ http://keeleabi.eki.ee/index.php?leht=4&act=2&vld=54
  2. ^ http://www.epl.ee/news/lp/evelin-samuel-kes-kaitseb-meest.d?id=65926712

"Dum quotes"?

The infobox on the right currently has the leftmost quote variety (with right quotes used on both sides) labeled as "dum quotes". This term appears nowhere in the article, nor could I find any evidence of its existence with a(n admittedly far from exhaustive) web search. (A search for "dum quotes" turned up plenty of hits, but none relevant; some are (probably jocular) misspellings of "dumb quotes", some are Wikipedia mirror sites, some refer to quotes by people or characters whose names end with "Dum", etc.) Is "dum quote" an actual term for this kind of quote, or is that some Wikipedia editor's idea of a joke? —Smeazel (talk) 09:49, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Searching using Wikiblame, it seems that "dum quotes" was first added into the article in March 2011 by a Finnish scholar User:Mlang.Finn, who said that ” ” was sometimes called "dum quotes" in Finnish or Swedish. The caption using "dum quotes" was then added in February 2012 by User:Incnis Mrsi. ” ” may sometimes be called "dum quotes", but since there was no citation given for both additions, it's original research, so I've changed the caption to "citation marks" which are both used in Finnish and Swedish to describe the quotation marks. - M0rphzone (talk) 17:27, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Dutch

I don't believe the statement that English-style quotes are the norm in Dutch. That certainly doesn't match what I learned, and it doesn't match the predominant usage in the Dutch article on quotation marks (though there is some debate on the same issue in that article). I see no authority cited for this claim in either place. Paul Koning (talk) 20:39, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

Rather late reaction, but indeed, „this style” is what I learned at school (1990s). However, a quick check of some original Dutch books printed 1980–2013 (granted, one flemish, but no translations) reveals 9 times ‘this style’, twice „this style” and once "this style". Taaladvies.net says that there are no rules. PiusImpavidus (talk) 17:49, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Article merge? Where's the discussion?

Someone† has placed "It has been suggested that Quotation mark glyphs be merged into this article. (Discuss) Proposed since May 2014." at the top of this article (and the corresponding template on the other page). But when I hit the discuss link, it brings me here and there is no discussion of the merger.

Oppose merge: both articles are already long enough on their own. The "glyphs" article currently (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Quotation_mark_glyphs&oldid=623673988 not sure if there is a "proper" syntax or template for permalink) is tightly focused on just the glyphs and encodings, without any long lists of usage by country, and serves as a good summary. It also has a decent explanation of the ASCII backquote problem, which doesn't really belong under "international variation". Language-specific encoding issues should definitely be kept here at "international variation" (e.g. problems for non-breaking quarter-em space in French typography).

Alternate proposal: remove tag due to lack of community interest (no discussion after three-to-four months). Query: how long would we normally keep an issue open? (Not being snarky; I genuinely don't know.) Is there a special procedure for closing off the discussion?

† Sorry, I probably should check the edit history, rather than just saying "someone". But stopping to drag through the history would increase the barrier to me writing this.

Pelagic (talk) 17:57, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

I ended moving some articles around and merging Quotation mark glyphs with what is now Quotation mark. — Beland (talk) 21:31, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Directly Entering Curly Quotes on Computer Keyboards

The article inaccurately states that “computer keyboards lack keys to directly enter typographic quotation marks, much typed writing has vertical quotation marks.” This is not true. On OS X, option-[ & shift-option-[ outputs “ and ” respectively, while option-] & shift-option-] outputs ‘ and ’ respectively. I am not editing the main article, since I am not sure if people would consider the option key and shift-option combos significantly different than a simple shift to make uppercase characters or not. I am not sure if stock Windows 7 or 8 OS still lacks this feature (the combo of alt-#### to enter a single character is very cumbersome and definitely pushes the bounds of what could be considered “direct entry”), and might still depends on unreliable smart-quotes. Also, there are several programs that add this ability to Windows (though I won’t bother to relocate and link them, and they might not be compatible with current versions of Windows). Noivad (talk) 01:44, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Spanish and em dashes

Perhaps a dozen years ago, I read a couple of Harry Potter novels in Spanish to improve my command of that language. (I'm a native speaker of English only.) I seem to remember that dialogue was always handled by leading em dashes, similar to what is described for Polish in this article. Is this common for Spanish, and if so, shouldn't it be included in this article? Ginkgo100talk 02:34, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes, that is typical in Spanish orthography. I agree that it could be mentioned in this article. Quercus solaris (talk) 04:35, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

Alternative usage of quotation marks other than as speech marks

I have no idea what I'm doing is called so I can't pull the sources up from Google to back my assertions up, but I think someone here should see what I'm trying to get at:

For speech I always use " as speech marks. But for everything else I use ' as quote marks:

For example: 

Andrew asked me: "Have you read the article 'EU Enlargement'?"
The 'rapid' bus was late by five minutes again, and an irate John exclaimed "Where on earth is the damn bus?"
Asked what he was doing, John explained "I'm reading 'The World Atlas' my dear!"

Fghdhg (talk) 04:37, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

If you can't find sources on Google, have you tried an old-fashioned book? This might just be your personal habit, though. I can tell you that long-form works, like The World Atlas, get italics, not quote marks of any kind. Darkfrog24 (talk) 12:24, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

Quine corners

The Quine corners should have an entry. 85.178.215.248 (talk) 17:05, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

"Quotation dash preferred for dialogue" for Italian

Well, that's just untrue. There's no preference for dialogues, in Italian: you can find «...» or — ... more or less in a 50/50 proportion. On the contrary, some authors oppose the dash, because it can be confused as the dash for incident proposition (often replacing the brackets). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.49.125.181 (talk) 15:55, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

There's no source listed for that entry in the chart, so if you're contesting it, you can remove the content until a source is provided. Or if you know something to the contrary, you can provide a source for that yourself. Darkfrog24 (talk) 20:53, 3 October 2015 (UTC)
Well, it's hard to submit "anti-dash" statements by some authors as a reliable source. As it's hard to submit the only reliable source about that, which is go into an Italian bookshop and open books. :D But it's also impossible to find any source about this alleged preference for dash. Here is a page from Treccani Encyclopedia (which is an important, historical Italian encylopedia), in which they list all the ways a direct speech can be introduced: quotation mark, dash, even just no punctuation at all. There's no mention about any preference for this or that. I think I can just remove that note and add the Treccani source. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.95.36.209 (talk) 21:49, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 3 external links on Quotation mark. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add {{cbignore}} after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add {{nobots|deny=InternetArchiveBot}} to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

checkY An editor has reviewed this edit and fixed any errors that were found.

  • If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
  • If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 00:16, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

English usage of quotation marks

Maybe I'm not a "normal" UK citizen but I've always used double quotes as my primary choice. This is how I was taught at school, and a straw poll of my colleagues confirms that they were all taught the same. Updating the main page on the basis of this evidence. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.97.176.218 (talk) 14:21, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

I agree with you. I also wonder if English should be in the table at all given the title of the article, but I guess it's helpful for comparison purposes. Maybe the article should then be renamed to "Usage of quotation marks in different languages". Scil100 (talk) 23:34, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
We really need a good, modern, descriptive (not prescriptive) source on this. Anyone? garik (talk) 13:13, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
I'm afraid, incidentally, that how people remember being taught at school is a very poor basis for making changes on Wikipedia. Even assuming everyone remembers right, this only reflects what particular teachers happened to prefer. What we want is to see what publishers prefer. With this in mind, I had a look through a bookcase yesterday, took out books at random and checked which style they used. The following are all British-authored and British-published books that use single as primary and double as secondary:
Watership Down by Richard Adams (Penguin Books)
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (Penguin Books)
My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl (Penguin Books)
Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith (Little Brown)
The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies (Sceptre)
Headlong by Michael Frayn (Faber and Faber)
The Black Death by John Hatcher (Phoenix)
Elizabeth's Spy Master by Robert Hutchinson (Phoenix)
I found two that used double quotes as primary and single quotes as secondary: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (Harper Collins) and The Pyrates by George MacDonald Frazer (Harper Collins). Since both of these are from the same publisher, I suspect that the main determiner of quote style in British publications is the publisher. This was backed up by my finding later a copy of Espresso Tales by Alexander McCall Smith (Abacus), where double quotes are used as primary, in contrast to Sunday Philosophy Club. I also found, as further evidence, that a British edition of Stephen King's The Gunslinger, published by Hodder and Stoughton, had single quotes as primary.
This suggests to me that both styles are used in the UK, but that single-as-primary is a more common preference among publishers (so far, six out of eight). As Scil100 noted on my talk page, the press seems to have its own preference: single quotes in headlines, double quotes in articles. On the basis of all this, I suggest that the article state that both are used in UK-English, and that we don't note a preference one way or the other until we can find a good descriptive source. If no one objects, I'll go and change it myself. I also agree, by the way, that the article title should probably be changed. It seems useful to have the English styles in the table for comparison. garik (talk) 14:02, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
Sounds good to me, in view of your findings; thanks for going to this effort. Scil100 (talk) 20:30, 29 January 2011 (UTC)
Maybe it's because I'm American, but I am astonished that anyone would use double quotes as secondary quotes. This is taught as flat-out wrong here. I've never seen it anywhere except this article (including hundreds of published books). I have seen single quotes used as primary quotes in a few cases, but never with a secondary quotation inside or for a long speech quotation, just to do things like quote a single word. Grammar girl agrees with me if that counts for anything: [2] Okj579 (talk) 16:32, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
If you think about it, it makes more sense to start of with single quotations and move onto double quotations within speech. What on earth happens on the third quotation? 'Josh told me "Mother wants use to Take the trash out now! or else!" and I don't know what to do!'. Fghdhg (talk) 04:42, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
It is because you're American. Grammar Girl says explicitly that "The rules differ in British English." Also, I've moved your comment down the page. It's preferable if you add your posts after earlier ones, unless your comment needs to be very closely associated with one higher up the page (and even then it's often preferable to simply use a quotation to refer back to it). garik (talk) 17:49, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

The entirety of the above discussion (save for the reference to Grammar Girl) is original research, which is not permitted on Wikipedia. Does anyone have any reliable sources to back up the assertion about quotation mark use in UK English? —sroc 💬 14:11, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

You could have looked for some yourself! But I take your point. I seem to remember meaning to look for a good source (as my comments suggest), but since it didn't seem contentious I kind of forgot about it. Anyway, I've added one now. Garik (talk) 15:09, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Having been in education in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, we were taught to use double quotes for work we turned in, like the poster at the top. This was for longhand (essays, reports etc.) as computers were not yet in heavy use. However at the same time printed books in the UK used singles. In short, there was different usage between longhand and printed matter.90.219.97.6 (talk) 08:54, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

I agree that double quotes first were taught in the UK. The "British" variant of single quotes first seems to appear only in books printed from the 1960s onwards, but I'm struggling to find good references for the facts. Dbfirs 11:03, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
I'm not sure that single quotes is modern British thing. The top 4 books in my nearest stack are 1921, single, 1947, single (both OUP) 1945 double, 1975 double. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 19:12, 24 January 2016 (UTC).

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 external links on Quotation mark. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at {{Sourcecheck}}).

checkY An editor has reviewed this edit and fixed any errors that were found.

  • If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
  • If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 22:51, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Quotation mark. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at {{Sourcecheck}}).

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

  • If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
  • If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 09:42, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

"Jennifer"

"Jennifer" is listed under languages, also "Choong Choong". A mistake? 2.242.236.216 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 18:45, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

French quote continuation marks

I stumbled upon an interesting example from 1763. The quote spans several pages, and the continuation marks are on the outside edge pointing inwards – i.e. '66' marks at the right end of the lines on the right-hand (recto) page, and '99' marks at the left beginning of the lines on the left-hand (verso) page. It might have been a quirk of that typesetter or publisher, I can't say whether the practice was common. It is t. 11, p. 371 et seq. in Buffon's Histoire Naturelle. Pelagic (talk) 00:13, 29 January 2017 (UTC)

Summary Table

Several things could be done to improve the Summary Table.

  • Most important, I think that the expressions “standard”, “alternative”, “primary” and “secondary” should be explained in the table itself:
    • “Standard” should be explained that it is the official conventions, decreed by laws or some rules from Language regulators bodies or entities;
    • “Alternative” should be explained that it is private uses, for instance, by manuals of style from certain newspapers, magazines, internet sites, etc.;
    • “Secondary” should be explained that it is for a quotation within a quotation; I believe that some editors have mistaken “secondary” with “alternative”;
  • Many languages could (should) be added, specially when the conventions are different than English or the script is not Latin; many clues can be obtained by analyzing computer keyboards or computer character sets for specific languages;
  • I am not sure if editors have made mistakes regarding Balkan languages; in former Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croatian was considered a single language, therefore, it’s a bit strange that Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian have different conventions; table comparing 5 neighboring languages:
Language Standard Alternative
Primary Secondary Primary Secondary
Croatian „…” ‘…’ »…«
Bosnian ”…” or „…” ’…’ „…“ »…«
Serbian „…” ’…’ „…“ or

»…«

Macedonian „…“ ’…‘
Bulgarian „…“ ’…’ or

‘…’

«…» ’…’ or

‘…’

  • The quotation marks used in CJK are really “…” (U+201C, U+201D) or they are 〝…〞 (U+301D, U+301E)? If yes, when (and where) are 〝…〞 used? I have found the 〝 〞 characters mainly in Traditional Chinese character sets;
  • According to the Danish Wikipedia Article, „…“ are standard, »…« are alternative;
  • It would be nice to refer how about the other countries using the English language;
  • According to the Hebrew Wikipedia Article, „…” are no longer used;
  • According to the Latvian Wikipedia Article, Latvian quotation marks have bounced back and forth during the XX Century between «…» and „…“, but the present convention is «…»;
  • According to the Spanish Wikipedia Article, the language regulator in Spain prescribes «…», while the language regulator in Mexico prescribes “…”; it should be checked if the situation of Spanish language is not the same as Portuguese language, i.e., in Europe «…», in Latin America “…”; if so, there should be a second line for the Spanish language like there is for English and Portuguese;

A colored world map would be better to show the historical relationship between different conventions. Instead of this and this example, the historical relationships would be clearer if one follows the following hierarchy:

  1. direction: “pointing” outside, “pointing” inside, “pointing” right, etc.;
  2. standard primary shape;
  3. alternative primary shape;
  4. standard secondary shape;
  5. alternative secondary shape;

Also, one should check if the alternative shape “…‘…’…” in some languages is not due to technical constraints rather than stylistic choices.

Standard or historical shape Usage of dactylographical quotation marks
due to typewriter
and computer constraints 		Overgeneralization of
English quotation marks
«…‹…›…»
„…‚…‘…“
”…’…’…”
etc. 		"…'…'…" “…‘…’…”

Code Page Guy (talk) 18:07, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Merge from guillemet.

I am proposing the merging of the article guillemet into this one.

I believe that there is no reason to have a separate article about angular quotation marks just because some people call them “guillemets”. My English Language dictionary doesn’t possess this word (if anyone knows about an English dictionary which has it, be welcome to add that information), therefore, I must conclude that “guillemet” is not an English word. In French it just means “quotation mark”, regardless the shape. To distinguish the shape, the French language uses the words “guillemets français” and “guillemets anglais”. Check the French Article, and also check how the French article links with the article “Quotation mark”, and not with “Guillemet”.

Just because they have a different appearance than English quotation marks is not a reason to have a different article, either. If so, it would be justifiable to have articles such as “Anführungszeichen” for „…“ quotation marks, “Citationstecken” for ”…” quotation marks, “Gyeop'hwasalgwalho” for 《…》 quotation marks, “Nijū kagi kakko” for 『…』 quotation marks, and so on.

Finally, nearly all the information in the article “Guillemet” is already present in the article “Quotation mark”. There is no need to duplicate information and making changes/additions in two separate articles.

Code Page Guy (talk) 15:13, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 external links on Quotation mark. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

  • If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
  • If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 20:08, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Quotation mark. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

  • If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
  • If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 23:21, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

“Blabla„ in French

Two straight lines above the line, two straight lines low on the line is used in French. Source: every bédé I have ever read. Anyone has more information? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.16.156.141 (talk) 15:26, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

British usage

"Finally, as the 18th century rolled over into the nineteenth, the growing pains of the double comma began to subside. Printers on both sides of the Atlantic had largely agreed on a practice of enclosing quoted text with matching pairs of opening and closing marks (“ ”) ...

... For much of the past century, British writers and printers have set speech in precisely the opposite way to their American counterparts: direct speech in books published in the United Kingdom is most often enclosed by single inverted commas, with double quotes relegated to reported speech. ..."

So, here we have from about the beginning of the 20th century that British quotes were single outside and double inside. This source later says:

"There may yet be hope of reconciliation. Of late, Britain’s contrarian speech marks seem to be reverting to the once and future norm ..."

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2015/01/30/quotation_marks_long_and_fascinating_history_includes_arrows_diples_and.html

This source is from a 2013 publication.

According to the University of Sussex:

"As a general rule, British usage has in the past usually preferred single quotes for ordinary use, but double quotes are now increasingly common."

"The Times", "The Telegraph", "The Guardian", "The Independent", "The Economist", Cambridhe Press and the BBC (if not government publications) all use doube quotes outside, single quotes inside for general text. Much as I respect its use of -ize and -ization spelling, it seems to be Oxford that retains the single quotes.

At school c. 1960 I was taught to use double quotes, but we were told previous classes had been taught single quotes. Has the Routledge author got something the wrong way round by any chance?

Others taught double quotes: https://www.kboards.com/index.php?topic=240500.0

The University of Sussex goes on to say:

"... the use of double quotes in fact offers several advantages ..."

"There is one situation in which the use of single quotes instead of double quotes can be rather a nuisance. This is when the quotation contains an apostrophe ..."

This is perhaps doubly relevant when one is writing subtitles that require reading quickly. I do quite a lot of subtitling, and, perhaps with reference to Wikipedia, thoe for whom I produce them indicate the presumed British preference for single quotes. Naturally, I believe this results in lower quality subtitles.

Could the preceding sentence please be modified to reflect the content of what I have written here?Rjtucker (talk) 16:42, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

Why not just edit the article directly? It is clear that the old single-then-double system in the UK is rapidly slipping, both because of the apostrophe problem and because of the influence of the Internet pushing things toward stylistic equilibrium. But we needed a source to say [at least some of] this, and you seem to have found some.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:49, 21 June 2018 (UTC)
OK. I was going to use a dubious template. I'll just cogitate on an edit instead.Rjtucker (talk) 16:59, 21 June 2018 (UTC)
@Rjtucker: I've reviewed what you wrote, and what our article says, and have some initial comments. First off, "much of" generally means "less than most of", or people would have said "most of". So, "for much of the past century" does not at all equate to "from about the beginning of the 20th century"; the former sourced statement is actually consistent with the ca. 1960s claim, which seems consistent in turn with your own anecdotal experience (i.e., that different groups of students around this era were receiving contrary instruction). It's actually a good bet that the Slate article's "for much of the past century" is actually paraphrasing our own "since around the 1960s"; writers for magazines like that frequently use WP as a source for basic factoids. Second, beware engaging in original research, like trying to determine who is "causing" the single-then-double style and laying that at the feet of OUP. If you actually read their style guides (New Hart's Rules and Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage in the last several editions, they all admit of both styles. The interesting thing that's happening is that the newspapers have been changing, since ca. the late 1990s, though if neither the Slate source nor the USussex one (which you didn't cite in specifics) get into that we'll have to leave it for now. It would be another OR exercise to try to put together a list of UK newspaper habits and then draw a conclusion from it. And you probably already know this, but a Web forum like KBoards.com can't be used as a source for anything like this. I'm not sure exactly which sentence you mean in "Could the preceding sentence please be modified". Anyway, I just did a copyediting pass on the extant material, and merged the redundant statements about British usage together into the "English" section. That's a pretty clean slate to work with, with the sources you have.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:40, 21 June 2018 (UTC)
I was intending to place the dubious template at the end of the sentence ending "this style dates back only to around the 1960s".
Yes, I was aware that forum posts were not considered suitable for references on Wikipedia. There is possibly a difference between original research and stating what is self-evident. Possibly it's not necessary to reference British newspapers' style guides to state they now use double quotes.
According to the English Project, the "cause" of the different usage was the arrival of the steam age in the mid-19th century:
"American and British practices are opposites because of developments in the nineteenth century"
http://www.englishproject.org/resources/english-project’s-history-english-punctuation
Can one not state that while double quotes are obligatory in American English, British English allows for the use of either single or double quotes?
"while double marks are obligatory in American English"
https://www.gsbe.co.uk/grammar-quotation-marks.html
If one is going to say one style is more prevalent than the other, should a citation for the research that came to that conclusion not be given. If newspapers are churning out double quotes and books, novels that is, tend to use other conventions such as dashes, where are all these single quotes to be found?
My own schooling experience suggests to me that those now around 70 years old and older were taught single-double quotes in Brtish schools (with the notion it was somewhat analagous to the way we use the marks for feet and inches – "Only we don't start using triple quotation marks, we go back to single ones"), while younger generations were taught double-single quotes.
The OUP is possibly/probably the most significant and influential British publisher still using the single-double quote convention.Rjtucker (talk) 23:51, 21 June 2018 (UTC)
My reference to the book by Sue Walker [3] Rjtucker (talk) 08:43, 22 June 2018 (UTC)
Spent a few hours digging into this (and this will be long, because there's a lot to cover). There's really a quite a bit of work to do at this article, and it's fraught with research problems (some of which aren't ones we can tackle directly, per WP:NOR, but have to find in secondary sources others have already published).
  • It's better to add more info (or remove bad info) than to tag something as dubious. The 1960s claims seems sourced, and we didn't have anything directly contradicting it, only a Slate article that can interpreted multiple ways and which may be based on our own material. But the claim does turn out to be problematic, as we'll see below in more detail.
  • For British newspapers, it might be feasible to provide examples, without jumping to any "Therefore, ..." conclusion that didn't come from a secondary source.
  • On the "arrival of steam-driving printing presses" claim at EnglishProject.org: That's a potential source that might contradict the 1960s claim. However, it doesn't explicitly do it. It says that "The nineteenth century produced a great divergence in punctuation .... American and British practices are opposites because of developments in the nineteenth century." But this is a generality; it never claims anywhere that the single-then-double style in particular actually dates to that era, only that divergence in punctuation began then, and is the ultimate cause of the current inconsistency. And it's basically a blog, by someone (one Christopher Mulvey) who's not a notable writer about English literature or linguistics. He seems to be an executive of the publisher, and wrote a rather promotional editorial about the organisation here. The fact that he spells E. E. Cummings's name "e.e. cummings" is a red flag; virtually no literary scholars do that (the few that mimic his sometime-use of all lowercase do it exactly as he did: "e e cummings", though it wasn't even how he usually rendered his name, so most give it as "E. E. Cummings"). Anyway, Mulvey's "The English Project’s History of English Punctuation" isn't really a proper article but is more "about my organization" material. It does have a bibliography, but it's unclear what source was used for what. It doesn't seem to be reliable, and should probably be treated as a primary source (an opinion piece), not as secondary research (Mulvey himself seems to have no editor or other above-the-writer control, so it's effectively self-published primary material).
  • A simple but tedious reality check is to use Google Books and the like to examine books published in the UK in, say, the 1870s to 1940s and see whether they consistently use single-then-double order (and maybe exclude OUP a.k.a. Clarendon Press back when, since we know they've used that style a long time). If they do, then the 1960s claim is wrong (at least the way it's stated); if they don't, then we're reading too much into what Mulvey is vaguely saying. It's tedious, because books.google.com, archive.org, gutenberg.org, etc., don't have complex search functions. Basically, we need names of late-19th to early-20th-century British publishers and publications, and then do searches on those names, and only look at results from the time period in question. To get started with that, I see a Cambridge U. Pr. book from 1925 [4] using single quotes as primary (and with typesetters' punctuation – the terminal punctuation is inside the quotes even when it doesn't properly belong there, as in most American publications, but not most modern British ones). But CUP might be doing the same thing as OUP; i.e., it might have been a style that originated in academic publishing, then spread further. However, another book the same year from the same publisher uses double quotes as primary [5], as does a 1925 London newspaper [6]. And the Walker book directly contradicts the idea that OUP and CUP use the same style, at least today. An 1886 British journal uses "American" punctuation (double and typesetters'). [7] Punch mag. of 1877 [8] does likewise; same in 1883 [9], 1900 [10], 1905 [11], 1910 [12], 1915 [13], and 1920 [14]. Some results from The Publisher a.k.a. The Publishers' Circular (among longer titles): 1897 [15]: Uses a mixture of styles, including single [and typesetters'] for actual quotations, with double for nested quotes, but double also for titles of short works (see p. 221); 1898: same, and I see also use of single quotes rather than italics for titles of major works, sometimes kerned widely (e.g. ... the ' Temple Bar ' and ' Argosy ' magazines will also be published ...") but often flush ('The Light side of Crocket : Stories, Sketeches and Verses,' by Norman Gale ...).

    This is all original research, of course; we can't use an analysis like this in the article to draw conclusions. But we certainly can use it on the talk page to evaluate source reliability and claim accuracy. Just this quick skim clearly disproves certain ideas, namely that single-then-double wasn't used at all until the 1960s, and that British punctuation was standardized in the era.

  • Thus, the 1960s claim probably needs at least to be moderated to suggest that it was around that period when the single-then-double style became dominant in British publishing (or in British pedagogy, or both). May need to go back to the original source for "1960s" and see exactly what it says and whether a) it's plausible but an earlier editor here overgeneralized what it said, or b) really does suggest the style didn't exist in the UK until the 1960s, in which case it's a false claim in a bad source.

  • Moving on, anything claiming that something is "obligatory" in this or that variant of English is being hyperbolic; it's more reasonable to say that it's customary or typical. I agree it would be more accurate to say double-then-single is customary in North American publishing, with both styles being used in British writing, and more broadly in Commonwealth publishing. Newspapers and the like do clearly prove this, but we're just not in a position to do analysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis to arrive at claims, like single-then-double is in the lead in the UK (or vice versa), that it is changing, or how fast. That'll need secondary sourcing that's actually reliable.
  • So, a claim that one style or the other is dominant in British publishing would, yes, need a reliable source making that claim. A mistake in this regard (made notably by someone who eventually got topic-banned from quotation-marks-related discussions, later from the Manual of Style entirely, then got indefinitely blocked when they would not stop PoV-pushing and inserting original research – we can do much better that that person did) is in supposing that a flat declaration like "Single-then-double order is standard in British writing" found in an American style guide is a reliable source. It's not. That's like quoting a Muslim Imam on Roman Catholic Bible interpretation. US style guides get all kinds of things wrong about British (or other non-US) style, and vice versa; they overgeneralize about everything; and they have a vested financial interest is erecting false and overly prescriptive dichotomies (perpetuating them is much of what sells style manuals); in trying to define American versus British style, an American style guide is not a independent source, and may not even be secondary, but primary for an exaggeratory claim contradicted by real-world facts. We ideally use British style manuals (or general, academic linguistic works from refereed journals) for claims about British English, and when we don't have them we have to view claims with suspicion, the more so the less reliable the source is for linguistic matters, the more vested its interest, and the further it is removed from British publishing.
  • We need to stop saying things like "in British English". These are not dialect matters (as any linguist will tell you, that's a sphere of spoken language, not orthography); they're publishing-conventions matters (i.e., industry, not dialect). A clear example of the difference: American news publishing is overwhelmingly dominated by the prescriptions of the Associated Press Stylebook; more than 90% of US newspapers (and goodly percentage of Canadian ones) follow it religiously. Yet it diverges sharply, on dozens of significant points, from other American style guides like The Chicago Manual of Style (the writers and editors of whom share a general dialect with those of the AP Stylebook) and it has more in common with the house style sheets of British news publishers like The Guardian and The Economist. Written style is primarily a matter of publishing genre (even sub-genre like human medical versus versus zoological versus horticultural writing) and register, not of national (or national-ish) English dialect.
  • Your school-experience-based estimate sounds like a reasonable guess, but we so far don't seem to have any sourcing at all on pedagogy, which is a very different matter from publishing standards (i.e. style guides sometimes made available to the public like Fowler's, and house-style sheets used internally by various publishing houses). Even in the US, which has somewhat more homogenized style, there's often a marked difference between what textbooks for students prescribe and what is found in major US style guides like AP and Chicago; they're not written by the same "camps". It's also a hassle to research: secondary through undergrad textbooks are very expensive, even used. I do have some American ones on hand, but not all that many of them, and no British ones.
  • Ultimately, we may have to cite style guide/sheet after style guide/sheet and paint a general picture. It will probably show that a) North American writing generally favors typesetters' quotation and double-then-single order [I don't think anyone questions this], and that b) British and Commonwealth writing leans away from typesetters' quotation (but is not consistent – there many different approaches to handling terminal punctuation), and shows both double-then-single and single-then-double order. It will probably also show that the latter is today primarily an academic style, and that it's decreasing. But these are just predictions I'm making based on the style guides I've already examined about these matters in the past. I haven't done this entirely comprehensively yet (though I have more style guides on hand than just about anyone, ever. >;-) It'll be a "teach the controversy" matter, in that we're going to have many (mostly prescriptive and scope-limited) sources giving conflicting information. Unless and until we get reliable secondary data on what is changing and how fast, probably the best we can do is observe (and cite) things like Fowler's three editions ago saying X but in the last two editions saying Y, and so on. Just treat it as a chronological "story".
  • The Walker book looks like it will be of great value for matters like this. Best US price I can find for it is $53 (that's better than the $150 or more it could have cost as a university textbook, I suppose). I may try to get it via interlibrary loan.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:29, 22 June 2018 (UTC)
A lot to ponder. The reason for the apparent contradiction between the original reference to the book written by Walker and what I cited from it in my edit might be interesting. I'm beginning to find that the use of single-double quotes seems to be holding fast for quotations in books printed in the UK. One explanation I've found is that double quotes clutter a page of discourse too much. Obviously, it is necessary to consider the type of media besides the country of emanation. I've now discovered the BBC stipulating double quotes to "suggest mechanically reproduced speech, e.g. radio, loudspeakers etc., or a quotation from a person or book." http://bbc.github.io/subtitle-guidelines/#Identifying-speakers Rjtucker (talk) 16:19, 22 June 2018 (UTC)
This is original research, but a quick survey of the books on my bookshelf indicates that the use of double quotes first (so-called American style) was standard in British English until the 1960s. The claim that it was introduced earlier is not actually supported by the given reference, though some academic publications might have used the new style earlier. In education, the use of double quotes first was regularly taught to my (older) generation. I own lots of books where this "double first" tradition was continued even into this century. I agree that some modern style guides and modern educators teach the "single first" rule. Dbfirs 20:57, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
In citing a source for Debagging yesterday or earlier today, I ran across an Northern Irish newspaper (2014) using single-then-double order; I think that qualifies as British, though I'm not sure whether RoI Irish English orthography differs in any way from British, and if so whether it might affect NI orthography. Anyway, the point being: even if British newspapers are shifting to double-then-single it's not universal.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:15, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
Yes, many modern books and newspapers are using single-then-double order, but my point is that this fashion was introduced during my lifetime, and is not universal. I have no idea whether there is a tendency to move back to the older double-then-single style. Just look at any original Victorian, Edwardian or inter-war novel to see that the double-then-single style was almost universal in the UK. Dbfirs 06:12, 24 June 2018 (UTC)
Fowler in The King's English 1908 says that the singe-double convention was (already) being used then by the Oxford University Press.
Walker says that British clerks were taught to use double quotes in commercial documents around the turn of the 19th into the 20th century and that that practice was carried over into typewritten documents when typewriters became available at about that time. It might be worth looking at the layout of a typewriter keyboard then – the current UK keyboard makes it easier to type using single quotes (the double quote rather awkwardly being above the "2").
Trying to ascertain the current use in fiction books some months, possibly a couple of years, ago, by picking books randomly from the shelves of a public library, I rather rapidly came to the conclusion that they didn't use quotation marks, rather dashes if not some other system. I didn't, however, check what they did when re-publishing classics.
Unless clerks were taught differently to schoolchildren, it would seem that the education system may have switched back and forth. I checked what punctuation the BBC was putting forth for various examination boards at GCSE level (16-year-olds), and none of those I checked made any recommendation about the use of quotation marks. One, in fact, has the question mark example: ‘What time is it?’ and the ellipsis example: "I wonder…" said Harry.
https://www.bbc.com/education/subjects/zr9d7ty
Since neither can really be said to be really wrong when writing in the UK, maybe they accept either.
And possibly that's what's most to be said about "British English" usage of quotation marks, no one is goung to tell you that you are wrong to use one convention or the other. Rjtucker (talk) 07:20, 24 June 2018 (UTC)
Yes, both conventions are acceptable, it's just that fashions change over time. If you had looked in a public library sixty years ago, you would have seen the regular use of "double-then-single". Dbfirs 07:38, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

@Rjtucker: "single-then-double order ... was introduced during my lifetime" is disproved by examples I already cited from Google Books. Maybe you mean that as a major or allegedly dominant style in British publishing it dates to within your lifetime. That's what the "1960s"-claiming source seemed to indicate. I'm starting to think it may be correct, since looking at books from the 1870s to 1940s doesn't show a consistent British style; both styles are clearly attested in period British works. Consequently, I think the "steam press" source is either dubious or was being badly misinterpreted, and I lean toward the latter.

@Dbfirs:You'll need to explain this in more detail. What the material says now is actually very closely modeled on what the source really says and appears to mean, and is a marked reduction of attempted re-interpretation of it to say "single-then-double style itself actually started as a big deal with the introduction of steam presses". We actually have no indication the style didn't exist before steam presses, nor any that it became dominant immediately after, and I'm sure that both ideas can be disproved easily (the latter already has). The "steam press" source is telling us, awkwardly, that the NY and London printing industries took off and developed independently, bifurcated, after the introduction of the steam press, and that differences between US and UK punctuation style are ultimately traceable to the rise of independent publication industries in these places; this is something we'll be easily able to verify from other sources. It is not saying that all these orthographical differences arose at that point, much less that they became nationally dominant then. We can already disprove that idea by looking at old style guides from ca. 1900 and seeing that they're more alike, across the Atlantic, than their modern counterparts.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:40, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

{{ping|SMcCandlish} "single-then-double order ... was introduced during my lifetime" was stated by Dbfirs. It's disproved by the King's English 1908 stating that it was in use by the OUP then. How long the OUP had been using it, the OUP's influence on others starting to use it and whether it was c. 1960 that it became predominant and in which media might be interesting considerations. Rjtucker (talk) 11:01, 24 June 2018 (UTC)
A shift in the writings of the Scot Thomas Carlyle from double quotes to single in 1838 is noted here:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Qqf5ymZnL3cC&pg=PA948&lpg=PA948#v=onepage&q&f=false
Much of "Why Do We Quote?: The Culture and History of Quotation" by Ruth Finnegan can be read without purchase here:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?redir_esc=y&id=UQezheDQSsYC Rjtucker (talk) 12:00, 24 June 2018 (UTC)
Sorry for the mixed-up pings. Anyway, the Why Do We Quote source looks interesting.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:10, 24 June 2018 (UTC)
Yes, it's clear that the single-then-double style existed before the 1960s. It just didn't appear in the books that I read at the time. I'll remove the "citation needed", though I still think the source doesn't quite say what we are claiming. The 1938 printing of the King James Bible by the British & Foreign Bible Society uses no quotation marks at all, but the 1961 New English Bible published jointly by OUP and CUP uses the single-then-double style, and I think this was the first time that I'd seen this style used in books I was reading at the time. Dbfirs
Well, one thing that emerged in some of the above rather scattershot and piecemeal researching is that OUP has long been in favor of single-then-double (i.e, since before the 1960) and is strongly associated with it, while CUP has used both, and later came to settle on double-then-single (presumably after 1960, but we've not checked yet). Anyway, about the place you put the cn tag: what's the concern, more precisely? How would you have put it? I'm not trying to impose my own rede, just avoid implying "single-the-double has dominated since the steam press", which is clearly a misreading. What we really need to do is look at some the sources that editorial used (or comparable material), since the house-organ editorial isn't really a reliable source, just a temporary stopgap until we find something better.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:54, 24 June 2018 (UTC)
How about something like:
"A nidus of single quotation mark usage in Britain was driven forward with the coming of powered presses in the mid-19th century, the evermore prolific and influential Oxford University Press among adherents to the convention."
I note the Wikipedia entry for the OUP includes a reference to "steam power for printing".
Not sure how to put the suspected, or even indisputable, predominance, at least in British newspapers, from c. 1960 until c. 1990 and the the coming of the Internet (and Wikipedia, and Wiktionary, and Google etc etc). Rjtucker (talk) 10:27, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

Use of quotation dash in Spanish and Catalan

The article states (emphasis mine):

In Italian, Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Georgian, Romanian, Lithuanian and Hungarian the reporting clause in the middle of a quotation is separated with two additional dashes (also note that the initial quotation dash is followed by a single whitespace character as well as the fact that the additional quotation dashes for the middle main clause after the initial quotation dash are all with a single whitespace character on both of their sides):

― Ай, ай, ай! ― вскрикнул Левин. ― Я ведь, кажется, уже лет девять не говел. Я и не подумал. ― Хорош! ― смеясь, сказал Степан Аркадевич, ― а меня же называешь нигилистом! Однако ведь это нельзя. Тебе надо говеть. “Oh dear!” exclaimed Levin. “I think it is nine years since I went to communion! I haven’t thought about it.”

The comments about whitespace use are incorrect in regards to Spanish and Catalan at least (I do not know about the rest). In them, the initial quotation dash must not have any whitespace between it and the word that follows, and the additional quotation dashes for the middle main clause after the initial quotation dash have a single whitespace character only on the sides outside the parenthetical clause. Like this:

―Bueno, no cesan de trasladarse, ¿no? ―dijo Ron―. Igual que nosotros.
“Well, they keep on the move, don’t they?” said Ron. “Like us.”
From Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows and its Spanish translation by Gemma Rovira Ortega.

For further reference, refer to the examples in the page for the Quotation dash in the Spanish Wikipedia[1].

Elmimmo (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 13:47, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Guillemets spacing

In Quotation mark it is stated, “adding a quarter-em space (U+2005 Four-Per-Em Space) within the quotes”.

Yet over on Non-breaking space it states, “U+202F NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE. It is also required for big punctuation in French (before " ; ? ! » › " and after " « ‹ "; today often also before " : ")”

So which is it?

KenSharp (talk) 15:46, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

In the era of metal type they usually employed the thin space (1/5 or 1/6 em). In modern times this is most often approximated by a single space. Note, in metal type there were no single notion of the "space", spaces between words, sentences and punctuation marks were variable. But there is a problem with word wrapping, when one guillemet may easily end up hanging alone on the next or the previous line. To treat this the no-break space (U+00A0) is used. Using the four-per-em space (U+2005) is pointless, first, because it is wrappable, second, because the space (U+0020) is 1/4 em in most fonts, so U+0020, U+00A0, U+2005 are often identical in width. Using U+202F may have some justification, if one wants discriminate spaces between words and between words and punctuation marks, or to fine-tune spacing. The Chicago Manual of Style suggests the thin no-breaking space for French punctuation, but allows the normal non-breaking space as well. See also the note here.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 17:20, 11 May 2018 (UTC)
Additionally, note that CMOS also “allows” NBSP (U+00A0) as a group separator in numbers for locales that use spaces to group digits, but that is not doing any good typography given NBSP is justifying (except in word processors \setminus Word 2013[2]), while a non-justifying non-breakable space may be either U+2007   FIGURE SPACE or U+202F   NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE; Unicode’s UAX#14[3] recommends U+2007   FIGURE SPACE for use in numbers, but that has never been in CLDR, that started specifying U+202F   NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE as a group separator.[4] Prompted and urged to argue about their messing around with NBSP, CMOS ed committee looks sort of scared into silence. A well-known and authoritative French style guide[5] is ruling that guillemets should have NBSP with them, but actually is using NNBSP (U+202F) with guillemets, on the basis of what is seen in said style guide. Still it actually rules and uses NBSP with colon [off-topic here, but noted for clarification], while mainstream French graphic industry is reported to use NNBSP everywhere a space is required with a punctuation mark.[6]
Why U+202F   NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE? Because when setting up the Standard, Unicode didn’t specify U+2008   PUNCTUATION SPACE as non-breakable, unlike what was done for U+2007   FIGURE SPACE, despite both spaces were used in—and have been encoded for—old-style numeric table typesetting, along with U+2012 ‒ FIGURE DASH (and monospace digits). That didn’t bother anybody but those doing French typography, that stayed unfeasible outside DTP software (or hot metal). [Hence I suspect that this outcome was the reason why that encoding “error” happened.] Fortunately, Mongolian does need a narrow non-breaking space, too, so this was finally added to Unicode seven years late. The French industry thankfully started using U+202F   NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE, too. Actually that is the main use case of NNBSP, according to The Unicode Standard.[7]
Sorry to be late replying. -- Hnvnc (talk) 13:08, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

How about Latin?

I'd like to know how quotes are made in Latin, but I could not find the information in the article. Do I write it as «Væ Victis!» or “Væ Victis!”? Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.106.139.92 (talk) 15:56, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Latin did not use quotation marks, but language elements like "inquit" ("he or she said"). -- Hnvnc (talk) 19:06, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

"pointing"

In many places, the article speaks of the direction that quotation marks are "pointing", usually including the word itself in quotation marks. The meaning is clear enough in connection with single angular quotation marks, ‹ and ›, and with Guillemets, « and ». As applied to curved quotation marks, however, the usage is, quite consistently, the opposite of what one would expect:

In Sweden (and Finland), both marks "pointed" to the right but both were at the top level (”…”), neither at the bottom.

Perhaps there is some sense in which the ” symbol points to the right, but it's not at all obvious; one would think that, if the tail is curved, the direction toward which it curves is the direction that the symbol points. Should we interchange "left" and "right" as applied to curved quotation marks and use some term other than "pointing"? If so, what would be a good choice? Peter Brown (talk) 15:54, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

Good point. That has been fixed in the article, stating that it’s the convexity that is considered pointing, not the tail, consistently with what is observed with angle quotation marks : “with the convexity pointing outward.”
Beside that, the scare quotes around “pointing” have been removed as pointless. -- Hnvnc (talk) 19:14, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Dutch use

I've been spending some time understanding the use of quotation marks in Dutch, and believe that the primary and alternative use should be reversed: Unicode U+201C (“) as the primary opening symbol, Unicode U+201E („) as the alternative, traditional closing symbol.

The reference used for justifying the use of the low quotation mark (Burrough-Boenisch, Joy (2004). Righting English That's Gone Dutch. Voorburg: Kemper Conseil. pp. 41–46.) simply makes reference to the way it is done in the NRC Handelsblad newspaper and gives no specific statement about it being the primary or correct symbol. One must bear in mind that this book is instructing correct usage in English and simply takes example from the NRC Handelsblad to explain how symbols are used in American and British spelling.

This is only one of two newspapers (NRC Handelsblad and Trouw) that still use the traditional low quotation marks. Indeed there is some degree of inconsistency on NRC's part even as their style book, the NRCCode, makes no specific reference to the use of the low quotation mark; throughout the document high quotation marks are used with only one occurrence of actual double commas (as opposed to the Unicode U+201E „-symbol).

The reference in fact acknowledges the low quotation mark as to be traditional, pointing out that American style is the adopted modern standard, for instance in word processing. — Stimpy talk 10:47, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

Indic quotation mark direction

At Quotation mark/Archive 9#History the fourth 'graph says while Indic scripts preferred the inward-pointing 99-66 convention (”…“)., citing this blog. The problem (aside from it being a blog) is that it is self-inconsistent:

8. उद्धरण चिन्ह (” “) (Quotation Mark) ... Example: a. महात्मा गाँधी ने कहा ” सत्य ही ईश्वर है|” (Mahatma Gandhi said “Truth is God” )

While it's understandable that the Latin-script in the example has the 66–99 orientation, both of the quotes surrounding the Devanagari-script are the "99" type. Further, I can't find any other evidence that is not a copy (or perhaps the source of) this blog. This 1990 paper on Marathi language (using Devanagari script) punctuation shows "66–99" orientation:

Thank you. I think we may implement this in the article body. -- Hnvnc (talk) 04:21, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

Braille marks

Hi! This page needs expansion to talk about Braille quotation marks, which can be found here: http://www.brl.org/intro/session03/punctuation.html Piparsveinn (talk) 23:02, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

Bulgarian Incorrect Quots

"„…“ is often incorrectly replaced by "…" or “…”" Who is using these "incorrectly", Bulgarian speakers? If so I don't think it makes much sense to call them "incorrect" and rather they should be listed as an alternative (or not mentioned, like the rest of the entries) 86.146.186.249 (talk) 10:23, 18 October 2019 (UTC)

Merits of elevated and in-line marks

In the section describing the parallel development of English-style elevated marks and French-style in-line marks, there are a few statements (particularly in the captions beneath the images in the margin) that sound subjectively biased towards in-line marks; for instance, the article states that elevated marks "clash" with apostrophes while in-line marks are "clearly distinguishable" from commas, breath marks, decimal separators, etc. For it to be objective, I feel like the section ought to also present possible benefits to using elevated marks, and drop the argumentative language. (Also, if we're going to argue that French marks are better because they're distinct from Armenian and Greek symbols and decimal points [which wouldn't be next to an elevated mark anyhow], shouldn't we at least mention angle brackets and the greater-than/less-than signs? But maybe that's nit-picking.) Etymographer (talk) 04:40, 13 September 2020 (UTC)

other characters

Other, quite similar, characters are used (maybe not optimally / appropriately, but not so seldom either), such as the four ⎣⎤⎡⎦. The article could discuss in which circumstances these should (not) be sued. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:6B0:E:2B18:0:0:0:80 (talk) 05:55, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

Curves don't "point"

When applied to curved quotes, the intended meanings of pointing in-, out-, left-, and right-wards are not at all self-evident, as by definition a curve doesn't have a "point". In contrast, since most curly and straight quotes are rendered as tapered lines, the obvious directions for them to "point" are "up" and "down".

The phrase "convexity pointing" is used in the third paragraph of the history section, from which one could infer what's meant by just "pointing", but this article is quite long, so it's reasonable to skip a "history" section when simply looking for a description of current practice. (Which is how I came to be writing this critique.)

(The normal way to describe the direction of a curve is as the average as one approaches each of its ends, hence "⊂" curves right, "⊃" curves left, "∪" curves up, and "∩" curves down. The normal ways to describe a line with an angle is as "turning" the same way as a curve, or "pointing" the opposite way : "<" turns right and points left, ">" turns left and points right, "⋀" turns down and points up, and "⋁" turns up and points down.)

I suggest either:

  • using different terms such as "inward curving" and "outward curving", or "curving left" and "curving right", or simply "convex" and "concave"; or
  • adding a "terminology" section between the introduction and history sections.

or both.

(edited to remove categorization, as it's not the main point) Martin Kealey (talk) 06:20, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

@Martin Kealey: All interesting but not a reference in sight for statements like "The normal ways to describe". And your suggested categeories are original research as they stand, so should not find their way into the article. Find some other reference for describing how things curve and things become better. Bazza (talk) 08:53, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
About time someone addressed this confusing terminology! Curves don't point; what point are their ends, always in the direction opposite to that which the text intends. I struggle with that every time I look at the article.
We don't need references or complicated terminology. Just change the article to refer to quotation marks convex to the left or convex to the right. "Convex" is ordinary English; if anyone sees a need, we can link to wikt:convex#Adjective in Wiktionary.
Peter Brown (talk) 16:48, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
The term "concave" doesn't work. Take C: is that concave or convex? It depends on where you sit: from the left it is convex, from the right it is concave. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 17:50, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
I don't suggest using the term "concave", though Martin Kealey has done so. Let's just use "convex" and always qualify it as to which way a quotation mark is convex. I have proposed "convex to the left" and "convex to the right". Would "convex on" be better than "convex to"? Peter Brown (talk) 20:23, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

I feel that "ordinarily describing a curve" falls under the sky is blue rule - that one should **not** include citations for things that are ordinary common knowledge. (If you don't believe that this is common knowledge, try this this thought experiment: on a road that curves left, do you turn the steering wheel left or right?)

I have removed the paragraph on categorization as it was an afterthought and is likely to derail my main point. It was not intended that the categorisation table should go into the article, rather that it should done as a mental exercise inform the choices of terminology.

To be honest "convex" and "concave" aren't my first choice; I included them merely for completeness. A mirrored pair of curved quotes is convex or concave when taken together; from there it's straightforward to extrapolate the meaning to individual quotes.

I made a proposed change to the article about 10 hours ago, and I would appreciate your feedback and critique.

(Unfortunately it has been reverted, citing "anglocentrism", which I believe to be wrong, but in any case I was simply following the left/right direction already established so reverting it certainly didn't decrease any anglocentrism.)


Please check my proposal from the revision history and suggest improvements.

Martin Kealey (talk) 22:18, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Your link points to
an old revision of this page, as edited by Martin Kealey (talk | contribs) at 08:26, 3 April 2021 (→ ‎Convexity: float table to right)
Is that what you invite comments on? floating the table to the right? I'm sure that you have something else in mind. It's best to point, not to a prior version, but to a "diff" representing an edit.
I quite disagree that "ordinarily describing a curve" falls under WP:BLUE. Nor do I understand what it is for a road to curve to the left except from the standpoint of a traveler; for someone going the other way, the road curves to the right. That's why I'm pushing convexity. To say that ⊃ is convex on the right or that ⊂ is convex on the left would be a sky-is-blue kind of statement; we can therefore use the locutions "convex on the right" and "convex on the left" without defining terms. But we can't expect the reader to know whether ⊂ curves right or left without explanation.
Peter Brown (talk) 23:34, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
I wonder if it might focus minds were we to try to write the description for a person who cannot see? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 00:21, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
I'm tempted to argue the logic of perspective, but that's beside the point, and I'm already taking liberties by replying so many times within this discussion.
I take Peter Brown's point that describing curvature as left or right is not obvious to everyone (as proved by example), but I believe the same problem exists with "convexity", for people who aren't mathematicians or opticians. So whatever terms are used, some explanation of terms within the article would seem to be necessary. And I mean an explanation, not just a definition; simply linking to Wiktionary would be quite insufficient to explain the usage here (assuming the audience following such a link is "people who are unsure of what we mean").
I made changes to add a new section that defines, explains and illustrates terms, and in deference to the discussion here, I used "convexity" rather than "curvature". Those changes as a whole were reverted by Code Page Guy with reason "‎Undoing anglocentric POV", which I can only guess was based on some (mis?)reading of "left" and "right" as meaning "opening" and "closing"; I regard that reversion as erroneous and I am sorely tempted to simply revert _it_ (and incorporate changes made since, of course). But rather than get into an edit war, I would rather seek opinions here on whether my changes actually increased anglocentrism (either of the article taken as a whole, or in my own text) and if so, how it could be improved.
My intention at this point is to reintroduce the definitions of terms, but perhaps as as one or more efn's linked from each usage of the terms, rather than as a preamble text, meaning that they would pop up on mouse-over. Does anyone think this is a bad idea, or have other suggestions for improvements?
(Incidentally, I would have given a diff rather than a revision if I could, but the Wikipedia mobile app makes some operations quite difficult or impossible.) Martin Kealey (talk) 07:38, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
My own view is that hiving off the more detailed explanation to a footnote via {{efn}} is a very good practice. Doing so means that readers don't need to get bogged down in in details that they already know but can easily access the more detailed explanation when and where they need it. So I support that plan. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 11:22, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

When curved quotes aren't curved

Some type-faces (fonts) provide oblique straight quotes in place of curved quotes, usually (but not always) with the tails pointing left or right corresponding to the nominal direction of curvature (opposite direction of "pointing", see above). Do we need a description of this? Martin Kealey (talk) 05:41, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Probably worth a mention, perhaps in an {{efn}}. Let's not refer to "tails", though: which end of a straight line is the tail? What's a better locution?
Peter Brown (talk) 17:15, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
"Straight quotes" are not straight lines, they're straight-sided tapers (wedges), so it's obvious which is the thin or "tail" end. Martin Kealey (talk) 22:57, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
Bushy-tailed mongoose
It isn't obvious that "tail" refers to something relatively small — comets' tails are invariably bigger than the comet — and it is surely uncommon to speak of the tail of a wedge. I suggest that, rather than referring to the direction that the "tail" points, we distinguish wedge-shaped quotes that slope up (’ and ”) from those that slope down (‘ and “).
Peter Brown (talk) 00:56, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
Peter, with all due respect, it is very difficult to distinguish between those marks at 10 or 12 points. Using a serif font, it is marginally (but only marginally) easier: (’ and ”) versus (‘ and “). --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 11:31, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
To be clear, I'm in no way insisting that 'tail' should be used, but this needs further exploration before settling on terms.
Perhaps "tail" is more obvious to someone who was drilled in correct writing - including punctuation - for many years before ever encountering a keyboard or a computer; for quotes and commas, the "head" is the part drawn first, as a small filled circle, and the "tail" is the part drawn last, as a single flick. To do otherwise would earn me a red mark on my homework.
As someone immersed in left-to-right writing, I see glyphs for ’ ” ‘ “ contrasted by having the "thick" end on the left or right side, but all "sloping up" from left to right, so it's by no means clear to me that those terms offer an appropriate contrast to explain the absence of convexity in such typefaces.
Yes it is really hard to find terminology that is universally understood, unambiguous, concise, and illustrates contrasts and alignments. Martin Kealey (talk) 09:05, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
Would it make it any easier if you were to discuss serif and sans-serif marks separately? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 11:25, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Typewriters and early computers

"What goes around comes around!" I see that we discussed this before and didn't really resolve. In the section,#Typewriters and early computers, I did a bold edit to use serif font (maybe I should also have specified font-size=150%) because the glyphs added in Unicode (U+201C “ LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK and U+201D ” RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK) are really only evident as the "inverted comma" (or "high-9") form. In sans-serif, they are barely distinguishable. I see it has been reverted (as part of a sequence of valuable edits by Bazza 7 and Spitzak, which I will certainly let stand). In an effort to make clear what it is we are trying to explain, I shall add those two instances of unichar for now, but maybe someone has a better idea? Because right now, it really isn't at all obvious that the Unicode symbols are any different from the original ASCII symbols. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 18:09, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @John Maynard Friedman: Thanks for your kind comment about my bold edit earlier. In a previous existence, I dealt with the difference between data values for character representations, and what actually appeared on screen or print after software had mangled its stuff. Unicode specifies the data values for various characters we give friendly names to, including those you mentioned above: U+0022 " QUOTATION MARK (often referred to as ASCII double quote) U+201C “ LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK, and U+201D ” RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK. How these display on screen or paper depends on the "font", or typeface, used; those available depend on the machine you are using and what resources it has. On most operating systems, including Windows (where I sometimes use Windows Character Map to help me negotiate this minefield of imprecision), a selection of "built-in" fonts are available, and browsers (in my case, Chrome) are configured to use a set of these for their default fonts (such as "mono", "serif", "sans serif", "code", etc). I've made a table below to show these three characters in a variety of default and specific fonts. The biggest problem for web page writers is not knowing which particular fonts any given reader may have installed on their machine, so I usually prefer to stick to letting their browser make the choice and not assume that what I see is what they see; but for an article such as this, that's not much help! I've made a table below to show these three characters in a variety of default and specific fonts which the browser you are using right now is configured to use. It looks like the "mono" variants have the greatest potential to show a specific character clearly, probably because those types of font allow a (the same) generous amount of room in which to fit each character. I have rambled too much.
Character Generic and specific fonts on this browser
default mono sans-serif serif Calibri Georgia Courier new
U+0022 " QUOTATION MARK " " " " " " "
U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE ' ' ' ' ' ' '
U+0060 ` GRAVE ACCENT ` ` ` ` ` ` `
U+2018 ‘ LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘
U+2019 ’ RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’
U+201B ‛ SINGLE HIGH-REVERSED-9 QUOTATION MARK ‛ ‛ ‛ ‛ ‛ ‛ ‛
U+201C “ LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK “ “ “ “ “ “ “
U+201D ” RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK ” ” ” ” ” ” ”
U+2032 ′ PRIME ′ ′ ′ ′ ′ ′ ′
U+2033 ″ DOUBLE PRIME ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ ″
Bazza (talk) 19:05, 22 June 2021 (UTC)
On the dodgy use of prime (using the wrong data value to display a specific character design): on my browser, prime in "mono" displays as two sloped marks. Perhaps yours is different, which demonstrates nicely the problem in hand. Bazza (talk) 19:07, 22 June 2021 (UTC)
I have added double prime to the table above. Bazza (talk) 19:10, 22 June 2021 (UTC)
For me in Chrome on Linux, the "Courier New" looks approximately correct. In any case I almost looked at editing the changes, but the selection of grave and prime seem to be the best way to get symbols in a fixed-pitch font that look like what these terminals were doing. Actual open quotes in most fonts do not look like the grave accent.Spitzak (talk) 21:10, 22 June 2021 (UTC)
"What you see may not be what they get" - Programming 101. Yes, it is a bit of a mug's game without seeing a wide variety. I'm using Chrome on ChromeOS and see the same as Spitzak: Courier New gives the best rendition. Mono renders double prime vertically, which is definitely not the effect we want. I have certainly seen old documents using a 45° tilted grave as opening single quote and yes, it looked terrible. See Kuhn, Markus (7 May 2001). "Apostrophe and acute accent confusion". Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. Retrieved 4 June 2012.. [Copied from Grave accent.] Are there any Mac users in the house before we go with Courier New? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 22:59, 22 June 2021 (UTC)
Probably should add single quotes (straight, open, closed), grave, and single prime to the tables.Spitzak (talk) 00:57, 23 June 2021 (UTC)
@Spitzak and John Maynard Friedman: Added those (and removed "code" as it seems to be just mono with a box around the text). On this Windows laptop, using a Chrome browser, mono (which by default uses the Consolas font: see Chrome's Settings, Appearance, Customise Fonts) is the clearest, especially for showing the distinct "6" and "9" forms for 2018-201D: Courier New's equivalents looks the same as various orientations of prime characters. Bazza (talk) 15:02, 23 June 2021 (UTC)
Which suggests that we need to use different fonts to illustrate different things. To show the heavily inclined grave symbol, we need to use Courier or Courier New. To show the 66 99, we need a different one but font substitution will mean that many readers will see something different unless we choose a very widely implemented font. Not easy! We might have to use that 66 99 trick to explain? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 15:46, 23 June 2021 (UTC)
@John Maynard Friedman: Yes, this is messy! I don't normally like having to use images for text, but this may be a necessity here to be sure of the reader seeing what is intended. Attention to labelling should satisfy any WP:ACCESSIBILITY concerns. If others think this a route to pursue (or at least test out), then it should be fairly simple to construct the four examples in the typesetting section as SVG images. Bazza (talk) 16:12, 23 June 2021 (UTC)
@Bazza 7:, yes, I think an image is the only practical solution. The accessibility issue can be resolved using alt= description, I think. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 16:47, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

What is "correct"?

This discussion relates to the correct quotation marks to use with English language orthography, rather than to quotation marks in general. With hindsight, it should have been done at quotation marks in English.

We seem to have a bit of a squall in an egg-cup going on. Do we have any reliable source that says that curved quotes are more "correct" than straight quotes? Certainly in most serif typefaces, quote marks are curved but in many sans-serifs they are not, they are just inclined. It is 150 years since sans typefaces were considered grotesque. I think we can all agree that the simple vertical ASCII apostrophe and quote marks (' ") would not be used in professional typography but even there I would struggle to argue that they are not 'correct'. Agree? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 16:27, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

No, we can't all agree that the simple vertical ASCII apostrophe and quote marks (' ") would not be used in professional typography: [16] is a professionally-run web site which has well-designed styles and layouts you'd expect from such an organisation, but much of it uses ' and ". (The site seems to be slowly converting to the curved variety, but I suspect (from the random mixing on some pages) that's a result of the device setting used by the journalists.) I'd agree with you that using ' or " in preference to ‘, ’, “ and ” is no more nor less "correct" than the other way round. It is the meaning which is important, and if a piece of text "written in straight quotes" is taken to have identical meaning to “the same enclosed in curved quotes” then all's good and understood. Bazza (talk) 16:55, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
Touché. I was thinking of book publishing but I suspect that you'll have a counter-example there too. Next you'll be telling me that it is ok to use 'lay' when you mean 'lie' and 'utilise' when you mean 'use'! :-^ --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 17:19, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
@John Maynard Friedman: Nah. [17] says I oughtn't for the first (but thanks for the enlightenment); and the second goes against the principle of keeping things simple (for which my favourite culprit is IBM's AMD, usually referred to by the rest of the world utilising a different set of three letters). Bazza (talk) 20:12, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
The inch sign is typographically incorrect for quotations. On typewriters it was great to save one lever in constructing the machine. And in the 1960s while drafting the ASCII character set it was smart to save a few Bytes for characters that only marginally differ in visual appearance. But this wasn’t supposed make a statement about typography. I got one (English language) book in my library that outright says ' is incorrect:

prime An abbreviation for feet (1' = 12") and for minutes of arc (60' = 1°). Single and double primes may be sloped or vertical, but should not be confused with quotation marks, […]. Vertical primes are also known as dumb quotes, from their use in this capacity on typewriters.

— Robert Bringhurst (1996). The Elements of Typographic Style (2. ed.). Hartley & Marks. p. 283. ISBN 0-88179-133-4.
‑‑ K (🗪 | ✍) 20:26, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
Well, the inch article says that it is traditionally the inch is denoted by a double prime and the double prime (U+2033 ″ DOUBLE PRIME) is inclined, I'm afraid that thesis comes a bit unstuck, except to the extent that they do have a clearly different appearance in a serif typeface but not (AFICS) in sans-serif. Speaking personally, I consider typewriter quotes sloppy but without a valid citation [yours fails verification], it remains editor opinion and wp:OR. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 23:36, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
@John Maynard Friedman: How does my book fail verification? The book does exist. I also have some German language books on typography essentially saying the same. Citing the primary names of Unicode code points is a weak argument. The purpose of Unicode is to provide uniform encoding. The Unicode Consortium itself even states they are no authority on typographical use:

The Unicode Standard does not aim to regulate or restrict typographical tradition.

— The Unicode Standard (PDF) (Version 13.0 ed.). Mountain View, CA: The Unicode Consortium. March 2020. p. 58. ISBN 978-1-936213-26-9.
Many [portable] typewriters didn’t have a dedicated 0 digit key. Instead you were forced to use the capital letter O. Now does this make the letter capital O a “correct” substitute for the digit zero? Of course not. It was a conscious choice against (typographic) standards in order to provide another special character, since there is only limited space available for respective levers.
‑‑ K (🗪 | ✍) 13:37, 4 July 2021 (UTC)
@Kai Burghardt: Nothing wrong with your book, it is the citation that fails because the source text does not make any assertion of 'correctness'. It says that close-double-quote is not the same glyph as double-prime, even if some arbitrary typeface chooses to draw them that way. Nobody is arguing that point, it is self-evident. The ASCII double-quote is not a double-prime either (which is what I was attempting to explain by giving the latter's code point). A careful writer will choose the correct code-point for each glyph so that, when output, the correct grapheme will be displayed/printed no matter which typeface the publisher chooses. Any good word-processing software will do that automatically but for specialist text, item-by-item verification will be required.
As for the horrible practice of using lower-case l for figure one and capital O for zero: they are typographically wrong but nevertheless they do achieve the purpose of writing, which is to communicate information. In some typefaces, of course, the effect is so jarring as to disturb the flow of reading and thus the communication. It is evident that we agree that this practice is not correct from a typography perspective but was certainly seen frequently in newspapers before reporters got decent laptops, so clearly the publishers weren't bothered by it. But can we say in articles that it is not correct? No, not without a reliable source.
I would be astonished if any source published in the past 100 years would describe curved quotation marks as correct and straight-and-inclined marks as incorrect. I would be surprised to find any source in the past 25 years describing straight-and-vertical marks as incorrect, though it might well be disdainful. I take the same view and, I suspect, so do you. Nevertheless, we can't put that disdain in the article without a consensus of reliable sources. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 16:09, 4 July 2021 (UTC)
@John Maynard Friedman: OK, I understood “should not be confused with quotation marks” as a statement " ≠ “/”, both with respect to visual appearance and usage. I mean, the entire book reads like a guide. You can also have a look at it via The Internet Archive. Here’s one German source that says unequivocally it’s wrong:
Falsch!
➙ Größer/Kleiner, Seite 191
➙ Minute, Sekunde, Fuß, Zoll, Seite 188
[…]		 »Größer als« / »Kleiner als«  >>Falscher >Satz< von Anführungen<<
»Minute« ' und »Sekunde« / »Zoll« " "Falscher 'Satz' von Anführungen"
[…] […]
Akzente ´´Falscher `Satz´ von Anführungen``
— Friedrich Forssman; Ralf de Jong (2002). "Anführungszeichen". Detailtypografie. Mainz: Hermann Schmidt. p. 179. ISBN 3-87439-568-5.

‑‑ K (🗪 | ✍) 11:10, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

@Kai Burghardt: Yes, I don't think the standard Wikipedia "should not be confused with" hatnote really works here. I wonder would something like "is not the same as" or "is a different glyph from" be better? What do you think?
No doubt you know that German orthography uses different quote marks, but as I don't speak German, I assume that you have already taken that into account.
Thank you for the info that the book is on archive.org, I shall certainly have a read asap.--John Maynard Friedman (talk) 12:01, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
@Kai Burghardt: I've read the book and can confirm that it was a great recommendation. The author makes many assertions of good and bad practice, but doesn't address this specific point. It may be that he considers it self-evident and beneath contempt, since he makes a cutting remark about --: Double hyphens in a typeset document are a sure sign that the type was set by a typist, not a typographer. [p.80]. He uses the term "dumb quotes" in the US sense of "dumb" (from German: dumm - stupid) meaning as opposed to "smart quotes" as supplied by word-processors (and not always smartly). The only deprecation that I can find that is relevant to this discussion is on page 280:
By convention, the inverted comma and apostrophe used in transliterating Semitic languages must curve ([sample]). Rigid inverted commas and apostrophes ([sample]), also known as sloped primes, are unsuitable for this purpose.
So no solace here, unfortunately. BUT put on your darkest glasses and see https://glyphic.design/typographic-train-wrecks/?route=/2011/01/31/typographic-train-wrecks/ . The author responds in the Q&A with a book-list that may serve our purposes? Watch this space... (that citation was given in Quotation marks in English, which looks like a forked article to me. What gives? Why do we need two articles a about the same topic?) --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 22:12, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

Update on "correct"/not

@John Maynard Friedman: @Bazza 7: I just reverted another instance of Code Page Guy's POV-pushing regarding straight quotes being somehow "incorrect"; any thoughts on how to handle this? Whoop whoop pull up Bitching Betty | Averted crashes 16:39, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

When you revert, I suggest that you refer back to the discussion above and hopefully Code Page Guy will contribute their rationale and we can debate it. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 17:13, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
Thanx, will do.  :-) Whoop whoop pull up Bitching Betty | Averted crashes 19:18, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

"Dumb quotes" are not correct typography - official

Type Rules! The Designer's Guide to Professional Typography ─ Ilene Strizver (2009) seems to be an important reference and she says (p.178–179) that typewriter apostrophes and quote are not typographically correct. The first "crime" described at https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fyti/typographic-tips/top-ten-type-crimes is to use typewriter apostrophes (though the author errs in saying that they are the same as prime and double prime). --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 22:46, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

I should have realised this earlier: all of the above relates to English language orthography and should have gone in the Quotation marks in English. I have retrospectively added a hatnote to the top of this discussion. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 08:49, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

Correctness, insofar as it is prescriptive, is a matter of effective communication

Does one communicate more effectively using ' and " or using ’, “, and ”? That is an empirical question. Does one style rather than another improve reading speed or comprehension? This can be studied. Any sense of "correct" that doesn't correlate with effective communication is not prescriptive and doesn't warrant this huge piece of a talk page. In some contexts, like Wikipedia, there is a standard that must be observed, but here the distinction is between conforming and nonconforming, not between correct and incorrect.

Perhaps there are studies that bear on the question. I do not know of any, but perhaps someone else does. Guessing that the curved quotes are more effective, at least among the audiences I write for (other than Wikipedia), I have written Autohotkey scripts to simplify their production. I am open to evidence that my guess is incorrect.

Peter Brown (talk) 14:58, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

There are two questions here: (a) do inverted commas make a text easier to read than typewriter quotes? and (b) which style enjoys the consensus of professional typographers as being correct typography?
Taking (b) first, multiple typography works deprecate typewriter quotes and apostrophes. It is not correct typography. There is a good reason why MsWord and similar software routinely converts typewriter quotes into inverted commas (aka "smart quotes").
Question (a) is more difficult and I have not found any source that makes a judgement. Subjectively, in a simple sentence, the choice of style makes no difference. In a complex sentence, shaped opening and closing quotes that make clear exactly where each quote starts and ends, must make a difference. But that is OR.
So coming back to the very first question that opened this discussion,
  1. we cannot conclude that typewriter quotes v inverted commas are or are not "correct" in the abstract: it depends on context.
  2. we can say is that typewriter quotes are not correct typography.
As an aside, the curvature or otherwise is a red herring because it is typeface dependent. I have seen an angular sans typeface that had inverted commas that looked more like 77 than 99 yet their purpose is unambiguous. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 17:11, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

In English

In this edit to the "In English" section, Code Page Guy asserted Type cases (of any language) always have the standard quotation mark metal types for the respective language and never the vertical quotation mark metal types. I reverted the change because of the red-flag words "always" and "never" without any references. CPG reinstated the edit, rather than coming here to discuss, as per WP:BRD, and summarising with Undoing ethnocentric and incorrect information. Type cases have allways the characters prescribed by national typographic standards in each country, which are “…”, «…», „…“, 「…」 and so on, depending on the country — and not necessarily curved. Please, show me a proof of a type case that has ASCII quotes intead of standard ones.. That seems an odd edit summary for a change to the "In English" section. My argument is that "always" and "never" are big statements to make without proof, and that the previous "generally" and "may lack" (or some other less-absolute word) is needed until that reference can be provided. CPG's and others' opinions welcome here. Bazza (talk) 19:41, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

I wonder if it is this sentence itself that is causing the 'misunderstanding'?: Type cases (of any language) generally have the curved quotation mark metal types for the respective language, and may lack the vertical quotation mark metal types. Why is that sentence even there? and if it should be there then why the phrase for the respective language when the section is about English language usage? (And btw, in support of Bazza's "never say never" point, I would expect every respectable academic publisher to have the sorts needed to provide appropriate typography for embedded foreign language text, for French and German at the very least.) --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 20:23, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
The solution is simple: it is moving the text starting with “Type cases…” from the section “In English”, and put it somewhere else. After all, this article is about quotation marks in general, not only in English. There is another article dedicated to quotation marks only in English.
Even though, I don’t see what is the big deal in having the initial text there. Type cases in English-speaking countries have the metal types for curved quotation marks because type cases have always the metal types for standard quotation marks: a type case in U. K. will have “”, and not ""; a type case in France will have «», and not ""; a type case in Germany will have „“, and not ""; etc. What I really want to point out is that saying Type cases (of any language) (…) have the curved quotation mark metal types for the respective language (…) is incorrect since a lot of languages do not use curved quotation marks.
You are welcome to prove that metal types with straight quotation marks exist. If you have any picture to prove that, I will be most thankful.
Code Page Guy (talk) 21:10, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
@Code Page Guy: The solution is even simpler than that: provide a reference for the assertion you made, as requested above. As that's not forthcoming, I'll take John Maynard Friedman's advice and remove the text altogether. Your statement above (a type case in U. K. will have “”, and not "") is wrong. On your request for metal types which have only "straight" quotation marks, you have only to look at a British typewriter to see that on many the only quotation marks provided are " and '. If you have trouble locating one, there are lots of good images at [18]. For digital fonts, here's a few from Linotype which use the " glyph in place of the more usual “ and ”: [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] Bazza (talk) 09:55, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
Good shot! but unfortunately misses the narrowly defined target of "typecases", trays of metal sorts. So typewriters and digital typefaces, even if made by Linotype, don't qualify because they are not typecases. Of course that just begs the question of whether the mention of typecases in this article meets the wp:DUE test, since it seems that the only reason to mention them is to say that the ones for use with English texts didn't have 'straight quotes'. So at the very least the sentence needs an context-setting intro and be reduced to English only. And then you run into the problem of needing a citation that makes such a general statement, which I will be astonished to see. Most typecases didn't have a sort for every posssibilty: few if any even had a sort for the opening curved quote, they just inverted the comma sort (which is why in en-gb, it is called an wikt:inverted comma); the Caslon typeface didn't even have a sort for the pound sign, they used an inverted capital J. CPG, if you want this text to survive in some form, you need to propose an introductory phrase, a simplified sentence and a citation. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 10:59, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
Bazza 7, correct me if I am wrong but it seems you are making huge confusions here. Read the whole article again. Typesetting and typewriting are two different things, they are kind of two “different universes”. That is why I inserted a picture of a typewriter and a picture of a typecase to illustrate that.
  • Typesetting uses standard quotation marks. Since each language has its own ortographic standards (including the rules for quotation marks), typecases differ from country to country.
  • Typewriters have straight quotation marks. Even in languages that do not use curved quotation marks, typewriters have straight quotation marks.
  • And to prove to me that typecases have straight quotation marks you show to me a picture of a typewriter?!?
Also, do not mention digital fonts! No relationship with what we are discussing here.
What is the issue, here, is your claim that typecases have straight quotation marks (strangely, you are not claiming that typewriters have curved quotation marks…). I am still waiting for you to show me a picture (a photograph) of a typecase with a compartment specifically for straight quotes. If you have one, please, I say please, share with us. It will be important for my work.
Finally, do not destroy other people’s work. Wait for us all to reach an agreement, do not change the text according to your convenience. I propose the following:
  1. Moving the picture of the typewriter next to the text about vertical quotation marks; moving the picture of the typecase next to the text about curved quotation marks; after all, that is why the pictures were included — to illustrate the difference between typewriting and typesetting.
  2. Removing the words “allways” and “never”, since they can be so absolutive words.
  3. Rephrasing the text to be clearer and more explanatory:
    from “Type cases (of any language) always have the correct quotation mark metal types for the respective language and never the vertical quotation mark metal types.”
    to “Type cases in the English language have typographic quotation mark metal types, because type cases have the standard quotation mark metal types for the respective language and not the vertical quotation mark metal types.”.
  4. Changing “Because most computer keyboards (…)” to “Because most keyboards (…)”.
  5. Moving the text “Because most computer keyboards (…) although sometimes imperfectly.” to the vertical quotation marks part. This sentence has to do with typewriting, not with typesetting.
  6. Changing “These are found on typical English typewriters and computer keyboards, although they are sometimes automatically converted to the other type by software.” to “These are found on typical typewriters and computer keyboards.”. Even non-English keyboards have ASCII quotes.
Code Page Guy (talk) 17:33, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
@Code Page Guy: you need to be less confrontational and rude. You are proposing to remove "the words “allways” [sic] and “never”"? That's a bit rich. It's what I attempted to do prior to this discussion but you reverted twice. Go ahead. Bazza (talk) 18:08, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
I didn’t understand the “Go ahead”. Does that mean that you agree with what I proposed? Code Page Guy (talk) 13:26, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
Against #4 above, I advocate keeping the text "Because most computer keyboards ..." as I changed the sentence to refer to word-processing programs, which rely specifically on inputs from computer keyboards. I think that this was an improvement since the following sentence, about smart quotes, has no application to typewriters. Of course Code Page Guy may disagree. Peter Brown (talk) 00:26, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
and the proposed revision to #3 is long-winded and excessively detailed (the article is about quotation marks, not typography or typesetting). I suggest
That is as much as need to be said here. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 11:35, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
In its familiar sense, "sort" is synonymous with "kind" or "category". Let's not force the reader to follow a link to understand what is meant. If the term is to be used, follow it with "piece of movable type" or something similar in parentheses. Peter Brown (talk) 03:16, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Quotation marks in translations into English

User 197.255.133.16 has reverted my edit here, writing "Do not change what is said in the foreign sources." However, this is not what I did in this edit, and I am restoring my changes. Rather, I changed the curved quotation marks “ and ” to the straight mark " in the Wikipedia editor's translations into English. For example, following the Spanish text «Antonio me dijo: “Vaya ‘cacharro’ que se ha comprado Julián”», I changed the translation from “Antonio told me, ‘What a piece of “junk” Julián has purchased for himself ’ ” to "Antonio told me, 'What a piece of "junk" Julián has purchased for himself ' " but did not touch the Spanish-language original.

Per MOS:CONFORM, "Formatting and other purely typographical elements of quoted text should be adapted to English Wikipedia's conventions without comment." Perhaps this means that I should have altered the Antonio example in the Spanish as well; I welcome opinions on the matter.

Peter Brown (talk) 17:10, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

First, I agree with your edit: the IP editor's version contravenes our Wikipedia:Manual of Style, specifically MOS:QUOTEMARKS.
Second, since the article is about quotation marks (use mention distinction), the Spanish syntax should be reproduced exactly – precisely because the Spanish convention is different and that's the point of including it. In my view, MOS:CONFORM does not apply in this case. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 19:31, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
  1. ^ es:Raya (puntuación)
  2. ^ Microsoft Community: Non-breakable space justification in Word 2016
  3. ^ Unicode Standard Annex #14: Unicode Line Breaking Algorithm, version Unicode 11.0.0
  4. ^ Common Locale Data Repository, CLDR 34 Release Note
  5. ^ Undisclosed reference.
  6. ^ Discussions on the Unicode public mail list.
  7. ^ [https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode11.0.0/ch06.pdf#G1834 The Unicode Standard, Version 11.0 - Core Specification. Chapter 6: Writing Systems and Punctuation. §6.2 General Punctuation. Space Characters
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Quotation_mark/Archive_9&oldid=1255386885"