There's a lot of generational change due to the use of computers in writing, in general.
For example, in Spanish, when I was a kid it was a given fact that exclamations and questions went between marks (¿? and ¡! respectively). Nowadays it's extremely rare to see opening marks - they exist in very formal contexts like books or newspapers, but even emails in the workplace got rid of them, and using them on social media or messaging apps would be just as weird as signing the message at the end.
Similarly in French, some accents are casually going away and certain differences are also slowly eroding (for example in English you put no space between words and punctuation while in French you do[1], but a lot of French stuff online is written English-style nowadays).
Internet in western countries really is creating some kind of English-centered shockwave.
It's true (to a much lesser extent) in other languages. Japanese internet slang[2] is still very Japanese but has stuff directly borrowed or adapted from English for a lot of new tech.
I'm getting into sci-fi territory now, but I think the Belta Creole[3] of "The Expanse" shows a cool futuristic take on a blend of languages where English still has the bulk of the real estate.
Does French not have problems with different words that if the accents are removed get written the same way, but have incompatible meanings?
Portuguese is full of those, and it's a major source of resistance on changing the language in Brazil. (Although Brazilian resistance may look like plain acceptance from French standards.)
Not so much. French tends to have words that are pronounced the same but are written differently thanks to all the silent letters and combinations that are pronounced the same:
vers, verre, vert.
mer, mère, maire.
In writing you can usually do away with all the accents (many of them are grammatical or the strictly correct spelling but without changing the pronunciation and with little change of the 'look' of the word) without problems.
The only “important” accented letter is “é”. In most cases “è” is completely redundant as it follows the rule that if the next vowel is a silent “e” then the current “e” takes the \ε\ sound. “Ê” makes the same sound but is there for historical reasons. We can determine if we need an open “e” sound by applying like 2 rules (the aforementioned one and e followed by two consonants is always open) and by memorising some of the multigraphs which are part of the phonetics as it is.
Removing “é” makes it harder to determine pronunciation and makes it easier to confuse tenses, eg “il a mange”, if you’re reading you might “a” and misunderstand the tense (he ate vs he eats). There aren’t any consistent rules for the use of “é” apart from the start of a word.
Personally speaking, I rely on “é” a lot more than I do on “è” and I’ve been tripped up by a missing ’ on “e” many times unlike the other one.
there are definitely words in French, where the accent makes a difference in pronunciation. there are also some cases where there are meaning differences, even when the words are pronounced the same e.g. du vs. dû.
Now it's usually not a problem, as ambiguity in general is rarely a problem in language due to context.
It requires me a mental effort without the accent, though, and I will register it as a typo. You might as well write "il a aimer". The later sounds the same as with the accent, but it's obviously very wrong to put an infinitive there.
I guess I proved your point to some extent: I care less about accent errors than other mistakes, and just consider it a typo. But reading a completely unaccented text is hard for me, and I text, e-mail, and communicate online a lot.
In my experience, people are not foregoing them on purpose, except on capital letters, which is an heritage of AZERTY keyboards + windows (hopefully AFNOR keyboards catches on). Capital accented letters is the example to cite if you want an example of computer technology changing our habits: my friend Etienne (Étienne?) insists there is no accent on hist first name, but it makes no sense to me.
But the point wasn't that you can't recover the meaning from context. Languages are full of homonyms and homographs, and even typos and outright errors usually don't hinder understanding.
The point was simply that accents in French can change pronunciation, or at least change the meaning even if the pronunciation remains the same.
I think the question was whether dropping the accents make reading a text difficult. Of course that may change words so requires a bit more effort but in general it's not that big a deal.
> Similarly in French, some accents are casually going away
In my view this is partly because of the 'focus' (or lack thereof) of the education system and partly because most software is developed in English first with the addition of accents an add-on, which makes typing accents cumbersome and thus the path of least resistance is to give up, especially when writing casually.
Yeah, since I've moved away from an AZERTY to a QWERTY I cannot imagine ever reverting back, but on the other hand this means no accent is directly accessible.
As of right now I'm on a mac and I feel very comfortable with the way they've designed input for "roman accented" letters (using the option key, or for some using long presses) but it's a whole other thing once I see a Windows computer.
> since I've moved away from an AZERTY to a QWERTY I cannot imagine ever reverting back, but on the other hand this means no accent is directly accessible
You can use QWERTY with accents very easily with "International keyboard with dead keys"[1]. You can configure OS to switch keyboard with Alt+Shift to have the regular QWERTY and the International-QWERTY when you need it.
Moved from German QWERTZ and never looked back as well. I figured QWERTY with Eurkey layout[0] is a good middle ground. As it allows me to use EN_US as a base for programming, but access umlauts, accentos and such if needed.
Have you considered the CSA layout? It's QWERTY, but the most commonly used accented characters are easily accessible. It's not ergonomic for programming, but switching between US and CSA doesn't require a significant adjustment (once you're used to it, at least).
Seems like a good one, and pretty fitting considering I'm in Canada right now :)
I'll keep it in mind if I end up making myself a desktop PC in the future. But I guess the hardest part about any good alternative design isn't so much the design itself but its adoption and how often you're interacting with it to rewire your brain.
I have created my own QWERTY-US-International Keyboard Layout which puts German special letters (and other European letters) near their actual ones. With Ukulele you could do the same for the French alphabet: https://leipert.io/keyboard-layout/
> in English you put no space between words and punctuation
In “typewriter” English which is dominant because of, first, typewriters and then ASCII and then keyboards and then familiarity (as unicode and mobile keyboard usually support additional characters easily), that's true of almost all punctuation. In typeset English (which Unicode in principle supports), it's true of somewhat less punctuation.
I don't think this is due to the use of computers per say. Rather I think this is the influence of the 'Anglosphere' online both in term of culture and of tech (for example in Spanish autocompletion could insert the opening marks but it's probably often not even considered by the devs).
Perhaps the software culture has also changed. When people were mostly typing "seriously" in Word or email all the correct typography was implemented. For example Word selects the correct quotation marks automatically based on locale.
Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. do not care. Just ship fast.
> I don't think this is due to the use of computers per say. Rather I think this is the influence of the 'Anglosphere' online both in term of culture and of tech (for example in Spanish autocompletion could insert the opening marks but it's probably often not even considered by the devs).
Indeed tech is not made in a local-friendly way normally - for example, losing those symbols is a direct consequence of the fact that they are usually buried with other rarely used symbols. But for cases like punctuation, I don't really mind it. It might just be me but I've never cared about " vs » and I'm happy to have an international standard to make things easier. diacritics are more important (n vs ñ, o vs ó) but those are usually far better covered by autocomplete, so no complains there.
I'm a native Spaniard as well. Do you write emails with opening marks?
Perhaps it's a generational thing, but so far I've worked for two multinationals including a bank and I can't think of a single person that bothered to do so, except for official communications that are usually edited by someone whose very job is to do that.
Neither did my teachers at University, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if the official rules are changed in the next couple of decades.
A different Spaniard here: I do write opening marks everywhere including emails, and I would expect that to be a generational thing as you suggest. I’m sad but not surprised to see those parts of the language being lost for many/most people.
I'm curious about the source here. I've always been taught (mid 40s, UK) to use "" not '', well before US English became readily accessible on the Internet.
I'm starting to doubt myself, but that was my understanding too. Furthermore "..." denotes a direct quote, whereas '...' can mean that the quote is indirect/paraphrased.
Note it's an "em dash", longer than a typical dash or hyphen.
I've seen them used also as kind of a replacement for parentheses. Sometimes a phrase benefits from —but doesn't strictly require— an extra clarification.
TIL. I thought that was standard in English as well. It is news to me that it is not. Out of curiosity, what is the standard English format for such dialogues?
In English you usually use quotes. The linked Wikipedia section has some examples in English, alongside the Russian/Hungarian/Finnish examples:
> “You don't seem to be anything special,” said Korkala almost sadly, “but there's no help to it.”
Another thing to note is that if the quotation spans multiple paragraphs, you repeat the opening quote at the start of each paragraph (but not the closing one - it only appears at the end of the last paragraph).
That explains why I always wondered English books and their translations use "said" and its variations way more than books written in the other languages I speak. Thanks for the explanation
I am from the Netherlands. The use of low opening quotation marks („hello world") is extremely uncommon and generally considered archaic — so much so that I forgot they even existed until I read this article.
I was just putting my books back on the shelves, and I've got two copies of De Kleine Johannes, one printed in 1919, and one printed in 1983. The first one has the „low quotation” marks, the last one single, ‘high quotation’ marks, but they are mirrored (the first one is a sort of upside-down comma).
I had not realized there were languages where angled quotations pointed inwards towards the quoted content. I wonder if there are legitimate cases (e.g. a French style guide discussing German punctuation?) of an outward-pointing angled quotation-mark language quoting an inward-pointing angled quotation-mark language or vice versa where it's ambiguous where a quote ends?
I don't understand where they got this data from. Double quotation marks is very much the standard in UK press, why are they claiming single is preferred?
The bit about a gradual migration towards English-style quotes due to the gentle but inexorable pressure of keyboards and software lacking the proper native equivalent is interesting and a bit depressing. I wonder if over time there will be a drift away from diacritics and non-English characters (like ß) for the same reason.
I actually have the opposite take. The use of "X" instead of «X» in Russia started with the typewriters, not the computers. Apple added the correct quotation marks in iOS 11, and you could see how people very quickly switched to using them on social media. The software helped people rediscover the correct symbols and drop the typewriter-era bad habits, all it took was a small software upgrade.
If you are using the Russian keyboard, it's the new default (since iOS 11). Before that, you had to long-press the " to get it (along with ˝, „ and all these other marks.
Interestingly, the computer keyboards are stuck with the old layouts. You can't buy a Russian keyboard with the right quotation marks. I am using a custom layout by Ilya Birman [1] that makes a nice remapping with «» available quickly.
Irish lost the overdot diacritic in the move away from traditional Irish type around the 1940s, but it will never lose the acute accent (síne fada) because the meaning of a word is completely different if you drop it.
Eg:
Féar - grass. Fear - man.
Cás - case. Cas - turn.
Lóndubh - (nonsense) black lunch. Londubh - blackbird.
The keyboard part is always somewhat surprising to me. There are layouts, some designed for specific languages, others to cover as many languages as possible, that enable entering all of the diacritics and custom characters one might need. Now obviously those never managed to gather steam, but I have to wonder why. Do people just not feel strongly enough about it?
As someone else pointed out [0], and I concur with, macOS does a good job on this. You can type e.g. German umlauts (äöü) and eszett (ß) effortlessly (Option+u a/o/u, and Option+s respectively), or British Pounds (£, Option+#, where it would be on a UK keyboard), all on an ANSI layout. Maybe less so for «», which is Option+\ and Option+| (i.e. Option+Shift+\). Might've been nicer to put these on Option+[ and Option+].
Personally, I've always hated the ISO enter key and QWERTZ (although that's a bit of a tangent). I also think having a different keyboard for every European language is a losing strategy, especially when people might be required to type in two languages. If you know about it, for some languages the macOS approach works really well.
iOS is also passable; a long press brings up options (e.g. on s -> ß/ś/š). It's a bit more tedious.
The long press (which also works on macOS) is really handy when you need to enter a character that you don't already know the key combo for.
As far as I can tell there's nothing like it in Windows - if you don't know how to input a special character, you have to open Character Map - which bugs me as someone living in continental Europe but using a US keyboard.
Agreed, but pertinent to this article I do find the key combinations for ‘’ and “” slightly annoying. They’re on adjacent keys but I’d much rather shift went from single to double than from left to right. Unmodified, the keys themselves are for left and right square and curly brackets and work “correctly”
Really interesting how Turkish and English are the only major languages that predominantly use "" as opposed to anything else (well, UK uses '' too though). I wonder how that cultural interaction happened or whether it's coincidental. Turkish alphabet is mostly based on German and French alphabets (with a certain dose of creativity) and Turkish language was heavily influenced by French in 19th century. So it's interesting that they don't use ,,'' or <<>>
Outside Europe I rarely see <<>>, in fact I never saw <<>> on the internet even on European sites, truth be told I rarely read any websites from Europe that are not in English so my opinion might be biased
They're more common in Asian languages, iirc- Chinese at least uses something much like them though far more obtuse (I think it is a different character, not just font anyway)
Aha! I just discovered that I confused their use of title marks 《…》with quotation marks, since American English uses quotation marks for both quotes and titles.
I would have sworn that I had seen the title marks used for both as well, but it has been 10 years or so since I have had any real exposure.
I systematically use «» for quotation marks regardless of the language I'm writing in. I just feel anything else is wrong, even though I'm the one breaking typographic conventions.
Those aren't rare in French-speaking communities (although " is dominant because of how bad the AZERTY layout is), and they're mandatory in press.
I've definitely seen ,,'' reading German literature (e.g. Kafka) and <<>> reading French literature. You're right about internet though, that is indeed interesting.
While this is the prevalent quotation mark used in France, " starts to catch on a bit. In my opinion, it is mainly due to the fact that « and » are not present on French keyboard layouts (and rather rare in general): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Keyboard_layout...
Another issue is that you are supposed to type a non-braking space inside, which is a hassle, and often not present on keyboards either. Word processors usually take care of both these issues, replacing " with the appropriate (opening or closing) guillemet + space.
Spaces are also used in Switzerland, but narrow (&nnbsp; instead of ).
However, sometimes it's nice to have a third and even forth option when you have to deal with laterals, concepts, maybe foreign language expressions, quotes and nested quotes at the same time. So I'm using angular quotes occasionally, but not generally.
"…" is genarally ok for casual writing and messaging, while „…“ is still standard for print.
You're very close to the truth in a way I (a Turkish speaker) did not even notice until now about my own handwriting. Turns out, I'm using << >> when I quote on pen and paper, and I use "" digitally. I had always thought that it was a weird stylistic choice on the part of the teacher that taught me writing in primary school, or that I had somehow 'corrupted' "" into super-elongated << and >> to be able to more clearly denote the beginning of a quote from its end marker.
Only now I'm realising I've in fact been taught to use guillemets and it took me only two and a half decades!
In hindsight, my primary school teacher was already about to retire when I was learning to write, so it's likely that she had been brought up in a much earlier school of style than one that is being taught now. Considering that Turkish has been shedding its Francophone writing style [0][1] for a while now, I consider it an echo of a bygone era. That said, Turkish still considers French its 'official' interface to Indo-European words, and there exists a structure that can convert any French word into a valid Turkish one. A simple example: London in Turkish is Londra — it sounds exactly the same as Londres spoken by a French speaker. A more recent example is Pope Francis, whose Turkish name is Papa Fransua, which sounds exactly the same as Papa François as it would be in French. Basically, the 'method' involves saying what you want in French and encoding it with Turkish ortography, and then it's a valid Turkish word. [2]
[0] Another one of these Francophone stylings is the tradition to capitalise the surnames, like Amelie POULAIN, or Bora ALTUNİZADE, which has been considered outdated for a decade or two.
[1] Writing style is moving towards Britain, but not words — 11% of modern Turkish vocabulary is still directly from French, second only to ancient Turkish from 11th century.
[2] Famously, Turkish alphabet contains the letter J solely to be able to encode French words with the correct sound — the J sound does not otherwise appear in any Turkish word, only in words derived from French. Outside of French words, Turkish retains the original Latin J sound that is also used in German, which is a Y sound, so it gets encoded as Y in ortography, removing the need for letter J. For example, Joseph in Turkish becomes Yusuf, Johannes becomes Yuhanna.
I was JUST putting together a feature that has a bit of quoted text and I was wondering if I needed to put in a localization request to my company's localization group. Now I know!.
For example, in Spanish, when I was a kid it was a given fact that exclamations and questions went between marks (¿? and ¡! respectively). Nowadays it's extremely rare to see opening marks - they exist in very formal contexts like books or newspapers, but even emails in the workplace got rid of them, and using them on social media or messaging apps would be just as weird as signing the message at the end.