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Comment by trzeci | Hacker News Reader

Which makes no sense IMHO is to use “” instead of "". But it could be my OCD also.

It's all fun and games until you try to copy the "66 and 99"-style quotes from one place to another, or your ”helpful“ text editor automagically makes a mess of them. It's a pity no good ``asymmetric'' style ever really took off in English. I'm particularly fond of the French «chevrons», and relatedly, ¡Spanish exclamations!

⸘Why has not yet the opening interrobang received similarly wide adoption‽

I don't really like the dedicated interrobang character, because it loses the distinction between ?! and !?, which is probably rather subtle, but to my mind definitively there.

I would argue that those two choices remain available to you, and that you can reach even finer levels of subtlety by using (or conspicuously not using) the interrobang.

(Just don't use "??!" because that's a trigraph for "|".)

How would you define "?!" vs "!?" ? I agree they're different. To me the "greater" feeling comes second. "?!" is more surprising, while "!?" is more confusing. With "‽" the feelings are equal.

I agree with you on ‽, but differ with you on the "!?" and "?!" -- for me, the first character is the stronger marker of sentiment.

If I could roughly generalize the sentiment:

Are you just going to stand there and lie through your teeth?!

Have you ever seen such an amazing sunset!?

So you're with joombaga, not willhimsa -- right?

I'd tend towards willhinsa and yes, I'd rather switch the question and exclamation marks around in rplst8's examples.

My thought is that punctuation "terminates" a sentence, and so the mark that's further to the right is "terminated" later, therefore it more represents the overall sentiment. The left punctuation mark is like a modifier; it's an adjective before a noun.

Are you just going to stand there and tell me this isn't the most amazing sunset you've ever seen‽

I think I'd agree with that, too, i.e. the first character being the stronger marker.

"" is a simplification that fits well in keyboard usage and ASCII, but not always real language practices. In my mother tongue we use a „quote”. Our characters in books speak starting from new line with a dash. But it's a different dash from simple minus sign we tend to use online, for simplicity. It's hard to actually use that on the Internet, but in books it's still the way.

OCD would use the former as those are more proper typographical quotes. Straight edge quotes is a computer text thing, not a typographical convention for regular prose.

You're right. I used to programming quotes so much that every variation from it makes a pain. Especially mentioned below the automatic quote replacement by some text editor. Which does not make sense for me, when I paste a code snippet.

Another pain is when I see such code snippets on the web.

For the clarity, it's not only the US quotes I have a problem with. Other languages have also their corks:

- PL: „quote”

- PL: ‚quote’ (single variant)

- PL: ‘quote’ (british variant)

- FR: «quote»

- DE: »quote«

French quotes, unlike most others, must also be surrounded by spaces (like the other punctuation signs that are made of two parts) like this:

FR : « quote »

And all of the spaces except for the one after the ":" should be non-breaking spaces.

DE would be: „Zitat“. »Zitat« is also allowed. «Zitat» is mostly used in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Note missing spaces compared to French.

(Edited after correction from user bloak below)

> »« is allowed but mostly used in Switzerland

I think it's «...» in Switzerland, while »...« is widely used in several countries, including Germany, and is the "main" system arguably only in Denmark.

See https://jakubmarian.com/map-of-quotation-marks-in-european-l...

You are of course right and I edited my comment accordingly.

DE would be: „Zitat“

I thought you made another mistake here, but it turns out it's just my font that is broken. For anyone else who might have this problem: The closing marks are supposed to go from bottom left to top right, whereas they are displayed going from top left to bottom right :(

Yeah, Hacker News defaults to the Geneva font. Those quotation marks are not pretty :(

One thing that irritates me is seeing "foreign" quoting styles in English, do editors or keyboard settings do this automatically ?

If I'm writing French then I will use «quote», I don't mix things between languages.

I could say the same about punctuation spacing. For some reason, I see this mistake a lot in some places like Quora (which is popular in India): "Putting the space before punctuation ,like this .It drives me nuts .How could anyone ever think that is correct ?"

Also, French conventions like putting the dollar sign after the amount (123$), or spaces in between all punctuation, like you used in your first sentence.

> Also, French conventions like ... or spaces in between all punctuation, like you used in your first sentence.

I'm a native English speaker, French is my second language.

Polish also has m-dash quotes for dialogue and nesting quotes that alternate Polish/inverted-French.

https://culture.pl/en/article/pen-to-paper-mastering-the-qui...

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