What do quotation marks look like when written by hand ?

[jcb]

Quotation marks, of various kinds, in various languages, look like this:

Note how the direction of the mark varies in the english and german kinds, but doesn't in the polish and swedish kinds. But, when I write quotation marks in english, I don't actually distinguish between the opening and closing mark. In fact, I don't give my mark any curvature at all ! Maybe this practice of mine is influenced by the ASCII quotation mark ( " ) that serves as both the opening and closing quotation mark and has no curvature. Perhaps this was less common circa 30 years ago, before computers became part of everybody's everyday life ?

Anyways, I'm wondering if people writing in other languages do the same thing. Do they actually distinguish between the opening and closing mark ? Do they give the mark any curvature at all ?

Furthermore, how are guillemets written by hand ? How tall are they ? Do they extend only from the base line to the mean line ? (as they do when printed), or from the descent line to the ascent line ? (which would make them look like japanese angle brackets 〈〉)

FYI, line heights :

[zompist]

I looked back at one my notebooks from 1986, when I wrote by hand a lot, and readably. Most of my quotes (single or double) were just lines, but a lot of the time there's a slight difference in angle-- `something like this'. And sometimes, especially with single quotes, there was a little curve to them.

Oh, and I don't blame the diagram for not explaining this, but the difference between US and UK usage is not the marks themselves. The rule in both places is that as you nest quotations, you alternate single and double quotes. It's just that they start with single and we start with double. Thus:

'Gor blimey,' he said, 'did the vicar just say "I'm chuffed to bits"?'
--vs.--
"Omigosh," he said, did the pastor just say 'I'm thrilled to pieces'?"

[Travis B.]

'Gor blimey,' he said, 'did the vicar just say "I'm chuffed to bits"?'

Did you have to make this extra-British just to add to the effect? Lol.

[linguistcat]

'Gor blimey,' he said, 'did the vicar just say "I'm chuffed to bits"?'

Did you have to make this extra-British just to add to the effect? Lol.

Well Zomp also made the American one EXTRA American (specifically, Southern Californian), so likely.

[Travis B.]

'Gor blimey,' he said, 'did the vicar just say "I'm chuffed to bits"?'

Did you have to make this extra-British just to add to the effect? Lol.

Well Zomp also made the American one EXTRA American (specifically, Southern Californian), so likely.

Well, the American version isn't all too far from what people here in Wisconsin'd say, even though I'm more used to taking the LORD's name in vain with "oh God" rather than the minced version "omigosh"...

[alice]

My handwritten quotes are just little straight vertical lines, whether single or double. There are probably some interesting stories about how quote marks turned out the way they did in different languages.

FWIW, to my ears Zompist's first "British" example is recognisably but not entirely Cockney, while the second is more generically "posh" or upper-class. The initial ejaculation in a more stereotypical Scottish accent might be "Jings" or "Crivvens", or even "Help m'boab".

[zompist]

FWIW, to my ears Zompist's first "British" example is recognisably but not entirely Cockney, while the second is more generically "posh" or upper-class.

psst the second one is American

Do people still say "Gor blimey"?

The initial ejaculation in a more stereotypical Scottish accent might be "Jings" or "Crivvens", or even "Help m'boab".

You could be completely pulling our legs here and I wouldn't know.

[hwhatting]

Concerning German, the second type is rarer, and the first is what you usually find in printed text and what is taught in school. In handwriting, they are sometimes curved and sometimes straight, but normally the opening quotes are indeed low on the line and the closing ones are up, like in printing.

[alice]

FWIW, to my ears Zompist's first "British" example is recognisably but not entirely Cockney, while the second is more generically "posh" or upper-class.

psst the second one is American

In some parts of the UK it wouldn't sound at all exceptional.

Do people still say "Gor blimey"?

It's more usually "Cor blimey" - perhaps a relic of the way the Romans abbreviated "Gaius" as "C" - but, not having been to London for a very long time, I couldn't say with any authority. Although I do remember my grandfather, who was a Cockney, using it in his everyday speech fifty years ago.

The initial ejaculation in a more stereotypical Scottish accent might be "Jings" or "Crivvens", or even "Help m'boab".

You could be completely pulling our legs here and I wouldn't know.

These are all from Oor Wullie. whose dialog may be considered representative of a certain type of Scottish English. I think "Jings", for example, is more or less a Glasgow equivalent of "Cor blimey", i.e. used unexceptionally by someone of similar social status. Of course in a proper Glasgow accent it's rendered as somewhere between [ʤʌŋz] and [ʤæŋz], just to confuse the Sassenachs.

[zompist]

Back to quotation marks... I happened to be re-reading Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, the 1904-13 comic by Winsor McCay, and his carefully hand-lettered introduction includes several examples. They're two straight lines, but they are tilted, much as I did.

[Kuchigakatai]

The difference between European and Brazilian Portuguese quote marks also exists in Spanish. For all intents and purposes, the standard of quote marks in Lat. Am. Spanish is "...", not «...». I have very rarely seen «...» in a book or newspaper printed anywhere in Latin America... I'd be interested in knowing whether there might be a rising trend to use «...» a bit more though, maybe in certain genres.

Back when I lived in El Salvador as a kid / teenager, I used to write "..." as straight lines but slightly tilted inwards in the lower part of the marks. I have sometimes seen people used curves instead, basically half rings.

[WeepingElf]

Tilted lines, slightly curved.

[Travis B.]

Do people still say "Gor blimey"?

It's more usually "Cor blimey" - perhaps a relic of the way the Romans abbreviated "Gaius" as "C" - but, not having been to London for a very long time, I couldn't say with any authority. Although I do remember my grandfather, who was a Cockney, using it in his everyday speech fifty years ago.

I wonder how the fortition took place, since "Cor blimey" is a minced version of "God blind me"...

[Ketsuban]

I wonder how the fortition took place, since "Cor blimey" is a minced version of "God blind me"...

I would hazard a guess it's phonopragmatic* since "cor" can be at the beginning of an utterance (on its own, even).

*don't know if this is a word—I mean the same kind of phenomenon as the final consonant of "yep" and "welp".

[Torco]

I don't think i've seen the «…» marks in spanish a lot. apparently those are called spanish, latin or angular 'comillas' (that's what we call quotation marks), whereas what I think of as the "normal" ones are called english comillas. the Real Academia recommends angular comillas as a first choice, anglo in second and simple comillas in third place to be used in nested quotations, like this

«Magdalene wouldn't "stoop to such a 'salacious' level"» said Bob

...but I don't think that's common usage, so I went to the webpage of the spanish monarchy and, behold! comillas inglesas in the first bit I see. I'd be willing to say outright that angular quotation marks aren't the quotation marks of the Spanish language, not even in Spain. As it often happens, the RAE be pissing outside of the pot.

aesthetically, 「I really like the japanese comillas」.

EDIT: oh, right, as for the OQ, I found I sample I had written maybe a few months ago amongst my papers and they look like this. Anglo comillas, of course. slightly marked which is the opening and closing mark, and oddly enough, doubled: in typing I always prefer simple comillas, but that's probably because in latam keyboards they take one keystroke instead of two.

More: show

[Travis B.]

I wonder how the fortition took place, since "Cor blimey" is a minced version of "God blind me"...

I would hazard a guess it's phonopragmatic* since "cor" can be at the beginning of an utterance (on its own, even).

*don't know if this is a word—I mean the same kind of phenomenon as the final consonant of "yep" and "welp".

In the dialect of English here at least, initial lenis plosives are largely unspecified for voicing - they may be voiceless or (generally lightly) voiced, and people normally hear unaspirated voiceless initial plosives as lenis to my knowledge (I certainly do) - but they are never aspirated, whereas "cor" here to me implies aspiration, which seems odd to me.

[jcb]

...but I don't think that's common usage, so I went to the webpage of the spanish monarchy and, behold! comillas inglesas in the first bit I see. I'd be willing to say outright that angular quotation marks aren't the quotation marks of the Spanish language, not even in Spain. As it often happens, the RAE be pissing outside of the pot.

I just read : https://jakubmarian.com/map-of-quotatio ... languages/ , which agrees, saying :

This practice has become especially common in Italy and the Netherlands, where the English style is common even in print media. Spain is likely going to follow suit, since the English style is recommended by El País, the second most circulated Spanish newspaper. In most other countries, the English style is still considered bad typography (but commonly used on blogs and forums).

A quick look at https://elpais.com/america/ confirms; one finds only “” , and no «» .

Nevertheless, https://jakubmarian.com/map-of-quotatio ... languages/ has a cool map that clarifies what the geographic groupings are :

EDIT: oh, right, as for the OQ, I found I sample I had written maybe a few months ago amongst my papers and they look like this.

The link is broken.

aesthetically, 「I really like the japanese comillas」.

I do too, but not as quotation marks, but in place of square brackets [] or round brackets ().

...

As a honorable mention, there's also the usenet quoting style ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_quoting ), which I still use somewhat often because most email servers seem to use it by default. (Also, 4chan probably inherited this quoting style from usenet.)

Code: Select all

>What did you eat today ?
I ate an apple.

Most interestingly, this is probably the oldest european quotation style. I read "Shady Characters" recently ( https://www.amazon.com/Shady-Characters ... 0393064425 ), and its gives examples where monks wrote a > (technically a "diple" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diple_(textual_symbol) ) outside the margin to the left of the line that is a quotation. (Furthermore, I wonder if the german style »« is partially descended from this style...)

Spacing with an empty line before and after the quote (and indentation), as blockquotes do today, was not done. I suspect it's because parchment was too valuable to waste with empty space, hence why monks also washed parchment to reuse it. (Aside : The only extant physical copy of some of Archimedes' works is on a parchment that was later washed and reused for church texts, so reading the original text requires ignoring the most salient top layer of text.) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest )

[Torco]

The link is broken.

aw, shucks. let me see if i can upload the thing.

I think this comes down to keyboards: I don't even know how to type latin comillas in my latin american keyboard layour: it's not written into the plastic chiclets. it makes me think that none of the languages that wiki and that map say use the angular thingies actually don't.

[zompist]

Just gotta use a Mac! «¡No hay problema!»

If you want to go down a rabbit hole, looking at old code pages is interesting. Windows originally used code page 437, which didn't have «» at all, but did have ▓. Oh, except in Europe where it's code page 850 which does have «» and ▓. Then it switched to Windows-1252, which has «», but no ▓. Windows generally uses 1252 now, with weird exceptions, like the command shell.

[Travis B.]

Just gotta use a Mac! «¡No hay problema!»

If you want to go down a rabbit hole, looking at old code pages is interesting. Windows originally used code page 437, which didn't have «» at all, but did have ▓. Oh, except in Europe where it's code page 850 which does have «» and ▓. Then it switched to Windows-1252, which has «», but no ▓. Windows generally uses 1252 now, with weird exceptions, like the command shell.

I thought Windows now uses UTF-16 internally, after a period of using UCS-2 (i.e. you're stuck with the Basic Multilingual Plane), whereas the rest of the world now uses UTF-8 for everything, resulting in ridiculous stuff like Windows putting Byte Order Marks at the start of UTF-8 text (where byte order is irrelevant to UTF-8).