Item — HN Reader

> Some people prefer the way a “space-en-dash-space” looks.

I think this isn’t just a matter of personal preference, but it’s also largely a cultural thing – in German, for example, the “space-en-dash-space” form is common.

This is true for a lot of other punctuation as well. For instance, in Germany, we quote „like this“ instead of “like this”. Whereas in Switzerland or France, it’s common to quote using Guillemets, as in «Hello there!». This style can also be found in German texts, though it’s less common than quotation marks, and it would typically be used »inversely«.

7 comments

> in Germany, we quote „like this“ instead of “like this”

This is also the traditional style in Dutch; it's what I was taught at school. These days many just use "upper quotes". You can still find the traditional style in books and some newspapers, but others have switched over the years.

In traditional Ethiopian you would use ፡ as a word separator, and ። as a full stop. Over time, people have started to "just" use the space as a word separator. There's some Wikipedia pages that mix both styles; for example on [1] you can see ፡ being used for the first three paragraphs and then it switches to a space. I rather like being able to see the evolution of language/typography on a single page.

[1]: https://am.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%8A%A0%E1%88%9B%E1%88%AD%E1...

Interesting. I also see a few periods and a lot of colons with a line over them.

What do they mean? Just curious.

Comma, question mark, stuff like that. There's an overview at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amharic#Punctuation

Thanks. I wasn't aware of this type of script either; I like it. Sort of a "missing link"(of course there is no historical relationship) between Kana in Japanese and Hangul in Korean.

Since you're quoting France, it's worth noting that there, double punctuations (?:!;) are preceded by a half-space (although in practice it's always a full space). Likewise, guillemets are surrounded by spaces (the space inside the guillemets might be a half-space, I'm not entirely sure). So it would be « Hello there ! »

Easy way to identify francophone writers. They always have a space in front of their colons, exclamation marks, etc.

Ahhhhh, thanks for that! I'm German speaking, and I must admit I questioned the intellectual capacity of some people I conversed with, due to that. In German there is even a slur for it: "Deppenleerzeichen" (fool's whitespace). Now that clears things up.

Just a convention. I used to snigger at the English language convention of capitalising the next sentence in a letter/email after the address - after all, you're still in the same sentence, so why capitalise it. But, it's a conventional thing, so now I do it myself.

That says more about you, frankly.

Eastern Europeans often drop articles because that’s (apparently) what they do in some Slavic languages. That’s a minor second/third-language quirk, not about an intellectual deficiency (lack of capacity).

Of course, some extra whitespace is even more harmless.

I think most people have these biases in one form or another. It's mostly a matter of your experiences I've found. Rural dialects especially trip me up. I don't know a lot of them personally, and most of the ones I see on TV are talking about.. rural stuff. Also, I think a lot of rural people who go to universities naturally end up toning down their dialects because they tend to be in the minority. So it's kind of rarer to see an academic with a thick southern accent. It will often be less pronounced. On the other hand Eastern European English accents have the opposite effect because most of the Eastern Europeans I've seen speak at length are chess grandmasters and physicists.

The only thing we can really do is try to notice these biases in ourselves and ignore them as best we can.

I never heard about the "Deppen Leerzeichen" in the context of punctuation, but always when German texts split up compound words with a space for no reason.

I think that's the central meaning, but it's used for space before punctuation as well (just a random reference https://www.lass-andere-schreiben.de/blog/kategorie/schreibe...)

That's normally called https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenken.

An unbreakable half-space, to be pedantic (though in this case the pedantry makes sense: you don't want your punctuation mark to end up on the next line)

And for extra fun, while the French word for space (espace) is masculine gender (un espace) for most its meanings, in typography, it's feminine (une espace).

Using an en-dash like this – you see – is the usual British style.

The unspaced em-dashes—like this—is typically American.

I consider a crime not to have any spaces between em-dashes and adjacent words. Traditionally, I guess, there were spaces of different sizes. Hair-thin spaces were typeset before and after em-dashes --- that's what I do in LaTeX using (\,). But, because different sized spaces have never been a thing on the Web, let alone plain text, people have preferred to not use any spaces, for some reason.

HN normalizes thin and hair spaces to normal spaces, so they can't be demonstrated here, but there is an example on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Hair_spac...

Oh dang the hair spaces look perfect.

I wouldn't call it a crime, but a convention. In Europe it's an n-dash with surrounding spaces, in the US is an m-dash without spaces. For me, the former is nicer, but crimes are maybe a tad more serious.

I think Medium uses hairspaces. And of course there’s some automation since all writers seem to get that thing.

There ends my trivia about that unusable site.

This is precisely what I do religiously in my latex: M-dashes are always {\,---\,}

Unspaced em & en dashes tend to stay glued to the surrounding words when there should instead be "word" wrapping at one end or the other of the dash. It is a crime against text aesthetics. We have met the criminals, and they is us - software types.

Not to mention, ems and ens are not Ascii and thus not strictly kosher.

And BTW, all of these can be found on the new AZERTY keyboard :

https://norme-azerty.fr/en/

(BÉPO version also exists)

That looks well thought out. I use a QWERTY layout with similar reasoning applied to the Option/AltGr levels (but entirely different in specific placements) and I routinely type various dashes and quotes without conscious thought, any more than I consciously think about Shift-level punctuation.

In Spain the RAE (equivalent to the Oxford Dictionary) recomends «this», but you will almost never find it except in professional printing. They are not in the keyboard, so everybody uses "this".

It's a shame when technology fails us in this way - I just mean that computers are created to be our tools, and if we want to easily write «this», we can make that happen. If we only have people with this mindset (computers are our tools) in the right places.

I'm sure that's a ton of fun for anyone trying to write a natural language parser. LMAO using the end brackets as start brackets and vice versa.

> trying to write a natural language parser.

I assume we're done doing that, that task is finished ;)

I get you mean chatGPT has solved the problem, but it feels as if its solved the problem without answering the deep questions. We still don't really get how the brain does it or the answer to any of the deep linguistic questions, instead we get two systems capable of language which no one understands. But at least its useful! So maybe there are natural language parsers yet to be written, for nothing else than to finally test our understanding of natural language parsing.

Actually we quote „like this“.

There are many other quote styles - my language uses „these signs” (which we call "ghilimele", similarly to French "guillaumets").

EDIT: Seems HN is eating up the right signs... You can see them on Wikipedia here, they essentially look like two small commas: https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghilimele

Oh, you quoted correctly, but the display of the right quotes is messed up. They should go from upper left bottom to upper right top, but instead show as upper left top to upper right bottom.

Yeah, so we could conclude that punctuation is not just a cultural thing, but – to make matters worse – depend on the whims of the font maker as well.

No, both “ and ” characters exist, as well as ".

“Convex” or „concave“ usage varies by language. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Summary_table

To clarify, I was referring to the mere technical fact that only if you type in a character like `“` (U+201C, “Left Double Quotation Mark”) using one font, it isn’t guaranteed to be rendered in the exact same style in a different font.

E.g., when I type a comment on HN and enter said `“` in the input text field, it uses my system’s default monospace font (Courier), which renders the character so that the stroke appears to go from bottom left (thick) to top right (thin). After I submit my comment, HN uses Verdana (the one from my system), which renders the very same character so that the stroke appears to go from the top left (thick) to the bottom right (thin). It’s the same Unicode character, but both fonts happen to render them differently according to how the font maker laid out and mapped the respective characters. (I can observe the same behaviour when I compare both fonts in my word processor, so it’s not HN-specific.)

“” look like 66 99 in conventional serif text fonts, but have wide variation in sans-serif and decorative fonts where they often resemble ‶″ or ″‶ .

„‟ are more consistent in current computer fonts by virtue of their Unicode names strongly suggesting a particular appearance.

    “ U+201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    ” U+201D RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    „ U+201E DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK
    ‟ U+201F DOUBLE HIGH-REVERSED-9 QUOTATION MARK
    〝 U+301D REVERSED DOUBLE PRIME QUOTATION MARK
    〞 U+301E DOUBLE PRIME QUOTATION MARK