I would like to quote something

Dave Anderson

Typesetter: **uncontrollable sobbing**

tendstofortytwo :blobcattea:

@danderson wait, swedish does that on purpose?

Dave Anderson

@tendstofortytwo apparently! Traditions are wild

Björn Fahller

@danderson @tendstofortytwo I don't think I've ever seen that »Swedish books» thing. I'm Swedish in Sweden. I read a lot.

Risotto Voted

@danderson ah yes, reason 100.000,00 for confusion.

Decimal separator - Wikipedia

(en.m.wikipedia.org)

erinaceus

@danderson Related to this (but not typography): Alphabetic order is different in different languages. German alone has at least 3 (two standardized versions from Germany, one from Austria). They differ in how they handle the Umlaute (ä, ö, ü) and ß. Danish has an ä and ö too, but sorts them after z, while in German, they are sorted somwhere at a and o respectively.

Alerta! Alerta!

@danderson Is that based on the language of the main text or of the quoted text?

/me runs for cover

maswan

@bjorn_fahller
It is mostly "old Swedish books" by now, pick up some books from the 30s-70s to see that in wide use.

I think I've seen it in some more recent print too, but the "" version is by far more common now.
@danderson @tendstofortytwo

Sheri Gulam

@danderson Does it depend on the main language used or the language of quoted text? Like, if my main document language is English, and I'm quoting Russian, would I use Russian quotes? (Same as French quotes btw)

CodeByJeff - Now with AI!

@danderson Japanese...

「そとにたべにいこう」

mkj

@maswan @bjorn_fahller Yep. Fell out of favor decades ago for some reason.

@danderson @tendstofortytwo

hypha - a fungus element

@danderson this one has read german journal with slovenian quoted, strange

Sky, Cozy Goth Prince of Cats

@danderson 「日本語」(Japanese)

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"