I would like to quote something

Tero Ykspetäjä

@bjorn_fahller @danderson @tendstofortytwo It’s still relatively common in Finnish books, although I think ” is more common nowadays (we have the same conventions as Swedish re: quoting),

Also, dialog in Finnish books: start a quote with an en dash, use no quote marks.

Dave Anderson

@tero @bjorn_fahller @tendstofortytwo Unicode also mentions that in the age of computers, partly due to the early dominance of the USA and UK, a lot of writing cultures have adopted some of English's typesetting rules, either for convenience so that the ascii keyboard is usable with minimal modifications, or because US made software didn't offer the local convention, and so a whole generation never learned their native typographic traditions.

Dave Anderson

@skysailor yup a little bit after that screenshot there's a section on asian scripts and what they do, which is equally wild once you incorporate all the variations and traditions!

Dave Anderson

@hypha for the amusing shitpost I cut out the large amount of text around the summary that indeed says that these traditions mix with each other, sometimes it depends on the publisher or the field (e.g. mathematics paper vs sociology journal), and also the time period. A lot of per country typographic tradition is being replaced by English typographic style just because computers make that style most accessible, so in the last few decades the differences have reduced a lot.

Dave Anderson

@mkj @maswan @bjorn_fahller @tendstofortytwo simple reason: ascii put " on the keyboard, and early word processing software wasn't very aware of local typographic traditions. People started doing "whatever the computer can do", which was a simplified form of English quoting style.

Dave Anderson

@vort3 that depends on the country publishing the book! In some countries the tradition is to use the guest language style in quotes, in others the host language style dominates (with usually increasingly ridiculous rules for nested quotes). Even within one country, sometimes it comes down to the style manual of specific publishing houses.

Writing: a game where all the rules are made up

Dave Anderson

@heiglandreas amazingly, Unicode addresses this! Like all typography things, the answer is "it depends"

Alerta! Alerta!

@danderson Unicode addresses that in terms of "it contains all the characters". Yes.

But it doesn't address it in terms of "which character to use" as it's locale specific and unicode is just a character set (which is locale-agnostic)

I could imagine that ICU though has some features for that.

And yes: It's always based on the general lamguage. Not on the quoted language

Dave Anderson

@heiglandreas the spec addresses it somewhat, although non exhaustively certainly. A large chunk of the Unicode spec is devoted to each script/script family that Unicode can represent, and how to manipulate it correctly to match the expectations of the language's user.

Nowhere near enough by itself of course, but Unicode goes far beyond just a code point database! Especially if you consider CLDR to be part of the Unicode family.

But the work is never done! An amazing project.

Dave Anderson

@heiglandreas I do wonder, as a thought exercise, how much "more" is required for reasonably good text editing beyond Unicode+CLDR+all the technical reports and notes and so on. Quite a lot I'm sure, but I don't have a good intuition for how much of the required wisdom is already contained in those documents _somewhere_.

Probably input methods is the massive missing component for non latin languages...

Dave Anderson

@heiglandreas and... Yes, after rereading the relevant spec section, I got carried away with that claim on quoting! I'm not sure it's possible to claim that style mixing between languages _never_ happens. e.g. a book about typesetting in other languages might choose to mix deliberately because it's important to the meaning. Although hopefully they would use a block quote or something instead. But, for the general rule, I was wrong, thank you for the correction!

Tero Ykspetäjä

@danderson @bjorn_fahller @tendstofortytwo The keyboard is also to blame for so many articles nowadays – even in print – that use the ugly straight quotes instead of the correct typographic ones! : (

(Not to mention the lost battle of wanting to have an N dash where it belongs, instead of just using hyphens everywhere…)

Eve, You Can't Prove I'm A Romulan

@danderson I don't know what Sweden is doing but they must be stopped

Dave Anderson

@EveOfTheFuture Having solved all other societal issues, they are now engaged in the typographic equivalent of experimental high energy physics.

GunChleoc

@tero @danderson @bjorn_fahller @tendstofortytwo I love my Linux Keyboard layout where I can just type “”…

BTW a lot of 20th century Scottish Gaelic texts completely lack the accents on the vowels due to the standard English keyboard