International quotes (Was: typography of the apostrophe)

[Michel Fortin]

Le 2005-10-19 à 18:11, A. Pagaltzis a écrit :


> In German, there are two interchangable rules: they’re either

>

>     „bottom and left doublequotes“

>

>     »angle marks, but opposite to the French style«

>     ›single angle marks for the inner ones‹


The bugzilla reference from Damian Cugley gave me an idea for  
international quotes. Instead of trying to be "smart" about it and  
replace standard English by their localized equivalents, why not  
define different shortcuts for different quotes. For example, German  
quotes could be written like this:

     ,,bottom and left doublequotes''

This would only require SmartyPants to recognize the `,,` construct  
as a lower double quote. As suggested previously, angle marks could  
be handled this way:

     >>angle marks, but opposite to the French style<<
     >angle marks, but opposite to the French style<

Single angle marks may be a problem though, but I'll continue my idea...

The same thing could be done for French:

     <<angle marks>>
     << angle marks with a space inside >>

and be turned into this:

     «angle marks»
     « angle marks with a space inside »

 From the table on the Quotation mark Wikipedia entry, I see that  
some languages (Estonian, Icelandic) use the same double quotes as  
German, but the closing quote is curled in the opposite direction.  
Quotes in those languages could be written this way:

     ,,bottom and left doublequotes``

and turned into this:

     „bottom and left doublequotes“

With these rules, you could write in "plain ascii" most of the quotes  
of the [Quotation mark table][1].

  [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Table

A notable exception is ”...” where both quotes are curled the same  
way as the closing quote in English (used by Swedish, Finnish, and  
Dutch (alternative quoting style) [^1]). The other unanswered problem  
is that simple angle quotes could be mistaken and replace a *true*  
greater than or less than, so it may be better to forget about them.


[^1]:
     Disclaimer: This is all according to the table, which may contain
     errors. (It doesn't seem completely right to me for French so...)


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://www.michelf.com/