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This is tangential at best, but a) I've been thinking about it for some time and b) someone reading this thread may actually know: why are there differences in
by klibertp 9y ago
This is tangential at best, but a) I've been thinking about it for some time and b) someone reading this thread may actually know: why are there differences in punctuation rules between languages? Comma placement before certain words in a particular situation, hyphen-related rules, quoting, and so on - there may be differences even within a single language, and differences between languages are even bigger. How come?
The punctuation - or more specifically, the commas, their placement or absence in certain places - is the last thorn my brain hurts over when reading and writing English. I read a sentence, and I feel like I'd trip each time I see a comma where there shouldn't be any. Like walking a rocky road or something.
- yorwba 9y agoMost punctuation was developed before any standardization efforts, so every language has rules that reflect whatever the most influential writers believed to be natural Quotation marks differ because the transition from handwriting to printed letters solidified different shapes like ", «, „ or “, depending on how the strokes were jotted down in handwritten text.
- ethbro 9y agoI think of it as similar to HTML vs CSS: words are the content, punctuation marks are an attempt to mark up a suggestion of how to present them. (Where I'm including whitespace in punctuation)
- Turing_Machine 9y agoIn theory comma placement has something to do with the natural cadence of speech, and that varies quite a lot between different people (even within the same language, much less different languages). There's a popular meme about it: http://imgur.com/gallery/ljjibpM http://imgur.com/gallery/ljjibpM