5 ms·
It's not always a computer problem. I have an O' name. There have been many college educated adults I've had to explain the difference between a quote ("), an
by charlieo88 9y ago
It's not always a computer problem.
I have an O' name. There have been many college educated adults I've had to explain the difference between a quote ("), an apostrophe ('), and whatever the hell you call the character under the tilde (`). I kid, it's the grave.
- kijin 9y agoThe backtick and apostrophe are often used to emulate ``curly quotes,'' which makes the confusion even worse.
- jamescostian 9y agoI think this style might come from TeX, based on this comment: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17695/any-reference-on-the-usage-of-a-backtick-and-single-quotation-mark-like-this#comment30967_17696 https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17695/any-refere... Manpages aren't written in TeX though (apparently they use something called "roff"), but they also contain things like `read' instead of 'read'... perhaps manpage writers tended to like TeX too?
- gpvos 9y agoProbably the other way round: roff/troff/nroff is older than TeX. I guess that on old computer typesetters, ` and ' turned into nicely balanced quotes.
- tankenmate 9y agoroff was the financial back reason that Unix moved from PDP-7 / assembler to PDP-11 / C. http://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/aosref/ritchie84evolution.pdf http://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/aosref/ritchi...
- teddyh 9y agoIn old fonts, ` often displayed as ‘ and ' displayed as ’. When they wrote ``foo'', that was meant to show up as ‘‘foo’’, which was a workaround for not having characters to properly spell “foo”.
- bmm6o 9y agoFor an extra challenge, you can explain what an 'okina is.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- halfdgvfyjjuc 9y agoThat character is a backtick not a grave isn't it? Also some cultures use «» as quotes. It's a big world.
- 0xffff2 9y agoIs there a difference? I think those are both words for the same character.
- pc86 9y agoIt's a backtick when by itself, grave when it's an accent over another character.
- dsp1234 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent "Programmers use the grave accent symbol as a separate character (i.e., not combined with any letter) for a number of tasks. In this role, it is known as a backquote or backtick."
- mark-r 9y agoASCII never really supported the idea of a combining character, so it's not surprising that the original intent was subverted.
- ygra 9y agoHeck, in some fonts ` even takes the form of ‛ or ‘. Which is probably where typing quotes like ``this'' comes from (which looks absolutely awful nowadays since it mixes an uncombined diacritic with a kludge of a punctuation character).
- kgwgk 9y agoASCII supported combining characters. That’s what backspace was for! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11654682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11654682
- pjungwir 9y agoIf you really want some fun, try explaining to people the difference between modern Greek tonos (e.g. ή, Unicode 03ae) and ancient Greek oxia (e.g. ή, Unicode 1f75). Or in UTF-8: paul@tal:~$ od --format=x1z tmp/tonos-oxia 0000000 74 6f 6e 6f 73 3a 20 ce ae 0a 6f 78 69 61 3a 20 >tonos: ...oxia: < 0000020 20 e1 bd b5 0a > ....< It's super fun when you are the only tech person in a Classics grad program and everyone else is turning in papers that look like ransom notes, because every fourth vowel has a different x-height from all the other letters. :-) Here are the two Unicode ranges (PDF): modern Greek: http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0370.pdf http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0370.pdf ancient Greek: http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F00.pdf http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F00.pdf Then again, try explaining to tech people the difference between ή and ἠ and how you can get ἤ or ᾔ. :-)
- memco 9y agoMy kingdom for a good monospaced font and supporting editor to handle these and RTL languages. I've found Setups that work with one or the other, but none seems to do it all just yet.
- eadmund 9y agoThe combination of Adobe Source Code Pro & emacs works well for me.
- Grustaf 9y agoYou're not saying the classicists confuse the smooth breathing with the acute accent, right? Only they can't figure out how to typeset them? How do you enter them nowadays by the way? In the early days of the internet before unicode there were special fonts from SIL for example that first of all were using Latin characters (you'd type W and it would look like Ω) and secondly I think had the diacritics as separate characters, so the font would combine them. It was messy but at least you could type it on a normal keyboard. You could even read it in its ASCII form, most of the hacks were pretty reasonable.
- pjungwir 9y ago
- l0b0 9y agoEven more annoying is when you realise that those quotes are a hack because keyboards don't have separate left and right single and double quotation marks. The rabbit hole goes deeper…