Re: Article on Finno-Ugric in the Economist

Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > Which UK,
>
> The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

And who has the authority to speak for her?

> > which convention?
>
> The US convention for numbers in the billions and trillions.

Really? Yet you wrote about the other convention (dashes).

> â??[...] in 1974 [...] Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced to the
> House of Commons that the meaning of "billion" in papers concerning
> Government statistics would thenceforth be 10^9, in conformity with U.S.
> usage.

Usage in papers concerning Government statistics covers about one thousandth
(or less) of all English language used in the UK. What about the rest?

> Despite this, the U.S. meaning is still rare outside journalism and
> finance, [...]â??

So even your source says that the UK adopted no such convention.

> > Sorry, but anyone who writes that an em dash has the width of "m"
> > cannot be taken seriously in matters of dash usage.
>
> Or maybe heâ??s been exposed to different publishers ...

Irrelevant. Either you know what you are writing about, or you don't.

> Is it absolutely wrong to use ASCII quotation marks for a piece of German
> text cited in English?

What are you asking about? The quotation marks around a quotation belong to
the language of the quoting document, so you should naturally use English
quotation marks around a piece of text quoted in a document in English, no
matter what the language of the quoted text is. If the quoted text contains
quoted text, then it's a different problem, with no good solution, except the
method of presenting the quotation using typographic means (e.g., indentation
of a block quotation, perhaps with different font), so that no quotation
marks are used around the quoted text as a whole and its internal quotation
marks can be conveniently retained.

ASCII quotation marks are of course wrong in any case. If you are forced to
use them due to technical limitations, you might be excused. Using _wrong_
dashes when you can use dashes is surely wrong, with no excuse. It is even
more wrong to use a dash without spaces around it when purportedly presenting
a verbatim quote of a text in a language that never uses and never used a
punctuation dash that way.

> > A quotation presented in quotation marks shall be a verbatim quotation,
> > including the original punctuation. (It was not a quotation at all,
> > just a distorted phrase.)
>
> If youâ??re using â??shallâ?? in its specialised internet RFC meaning,
> then sure.

Don't be ridiculous. This is not an RFC context.

> If youâ??re using it descriptively, nope, that is not so. Cf.
> _Bulletin de la société de linguistique de Paris, 1871_, p. clxxiv:

"Shall" means "shall" unless specified otherwise. In this case, it is a
matter of a norm of civilized language. You either quote the original, or
you present some translation. Using something in between, like original text
with messed-up punctuation or orthography, is just barbaric. Quoting sources
that violate such principles proves nothing.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Creditors - Final Accounts
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  • Re: Creditors - Final Accounts
    ... means that it is an exact copy of the quote. ... double quotation marks as marking an exact quotation, ... single quotation marks as marking a paraphrased quotation or ... another convention when quoting text in the body ...
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  • Re: Article on Finno-Ugric in the Economist
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  • Re: New Orleans, The part that pisses me off about it...
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  • Re: OT: Punctuation
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