- The Polish acute accent is shorter and stubbier than the Western one.
- French likes to put spaces in front of certain terminal punctuations, notably semicolon and colon, and also inside guillemets.
- Quotation marks have at least six flavors in Europe alone:
- 6-quotes ... 9-quotes (English, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Turkish)
- 9-quotes ... 9-quotes (Scandinavian languages)
- low-9-quotes ... 6-quotes (German, Czech, Slovak)
- low-9-quotes ... 9-quotes (Hungarian, Polish)
- guillemets pointing in (Slovene, German sometimes)
- guillemets pointing out (French, Greek, Russian)
- Some languages like initial dashes for dialogue, some don't.
- French c with cedilla can be written with a detached comma below, but not so in Portuguese or Catalan. Turkish insists on s with cedilla, Romanian on s with a comma below for their respective sh-sounds. (The story for Gagauz, which is a Turkic language spoken in Romania, is still uncertain.)
- Inverted punctuation marks are unique to Spanish.
- Lojban uses dots at the beginnings of words. :-)
2006-03-22
Typographical variety
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2 comments:
In Finnish, an older variety of quoting is to use guillemets pointing to the right both at the start and end of the quote.
The official French space between punctuation is a quarter em.
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