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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

Is ,comma-backtick` some personal quirk of yours, or is it some standard I'm not aware of?

European quotation marks commonly have the left one down low and the right one up high. The same applies for single quotes. But using comma-backtick is deeply unorthodox.

Germany != Europe.

The French use « », Italians use ‘regular’ “quotes”, etc.

Strangely enough, this is the first time I see your style of quote, in two decades on the Internet.

https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/formex/physical-...

Yeah I’m surprised at how rare this is to see. I guess that means all Germans don’t follow this convention?

I believe it should be double, „like this“, not single quotes.

Other countries use it too. I'm pretty sure that Spain does.

Nope, Spain uses « » (though mostly only in formal writing these days) or English-style quotes.

> European quotation marks commonly have the left one down low and the right one up high

Wouldn't say it's "common", because IIRC that's only the case in Germany and Austria.

however in German you would use two tick quotation marks like „this".

Also in Polish, actually.

And some others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Summary_table

Interestingly, the author does not follow this convention on his personal site (first link in profile) … instead option for the ‘single quote’ form instead.

To give a definite answer to the discussion below - it seems Czech, Slovak, German, Slovenian and Croatian sometimes use this format. Here an authoritative source: the EU publications office:

https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/formex/physical-...

It‘s what my phone made out of two presses of the same (single quote) button.

It's ‚comma-apostrophe‘, actually.

,comma-apostrophe'? Only place I've see the backtick used for apostrophe is latex. And even then half the people don't know about it.

Sure, but there's no backtick in the GP's comment. Only an apostrophe.

Wait what? I see

,comma-backtick` whereas I wrote ,comma-apostrophe'

I copy pasted both btw. You see them both as '? I see GP as having ` and me having '

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backtick

tcmb used ‚comma-apostrophe‘. nsxwolf asked "Is ,comma-backtick` some personal quirk of yours, or is it some standard I'm not aware of?"

I'm pointing out that nsxwolf was wrong to ask about comma-backtick, because tcmb used comma-apostrophe.

Both are wrong. tcmb didn’t use ‚comma-apostrophe’ – they opened with , U+201A SINGLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK (not U+002C COMMA) and closed with ‘ U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (otherwise known as an open single quotation mark).

This matches the German convention described on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#German.

Sorry I was quoting nsxwolf. But now that you point it out, I can see the difference. It's subtle so I'll copy paste so others can see.

tcmb: ‚usename‘

nsxwolf: ,comma-backtick`

stavros: ‚comma-apostrophe‘

godelski: ,comma-apostrophe'

Though while copy pasting I see tcmb and stavros as having the same character which is different from the longer character you pasted. Seems my clipboard doesn't like that character. I also seem to have crashed OSX's emoji and symbol tray. No longer pops up if I press the button (bottom left) or select from firefox but got it back by opening safari.

Fuck man, I do not envy you people working on ligatures. Or timezones. I'm always impressed by these random rabbitholes and complexities in things that always look very simple. It's beautiful in a weird way.

Wow this is like the most HN thread I've ever seen, I love it! It's almost like a punctuation version of "Who's on first?"

Everybody's arguing, then finally all is revealed, and I learned a ton of stuff along the way about German quotation marks and the subtle difference between backticks and opening curly quotes, and low quotation marks and commas, in the Verdana font!

(If this had been a serif font with actual curly quotes the differences would have been much more obvious...)

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