Re: Article on Finno-Ugric in the Economist

Aidan Kehoe wrote:

> I said “The UK
took up [this] convention three decades ago”

You quoted that the Prime Minister said that a convention will be applied "in papers concerning Government statistics". As I already pointed out, that covers but a minuscule part of the use of English in the UK.

I wrote about two conventions in two separate paragraphs;

Once again, obscure references to quoted text using vague pronouns made the message unnecessarily confused.

> > Despite this, the U.S. meaning is still rare outside journalism and
> > finance, [...]
> > So even your source says that the UK adopted no such convention.

It doesn’t say any such thing.

It clearly says that the UK has not adopted the convention, despite government efforts for a fairly long time. The only thing that the government policy has achieved is uncertainty and obscurity so that it is now surely best to avoid the word "billion" completely. Just as we would not use "million" (but express numbers in some different way) if the word meant 1,000,000 to most people but 1,000 in government statistics and some other contexts. Actually, the situation is similar in many other countries as well. I have seen too many wrong translations in Finnish press that mechanically translate "billion" as "biljoona" that I know that I do not know what the word means without making some analysis or checking facts from reliable sources.

> > > 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 he’s been exposed to different publishers ...
> > Irrelevant. Either you know what you are writing about, or you don't.

And it seems that on this, you don’t.

Apparently you, too, refuse to make an actual experiment with the em dash character in different fonts, comparing its width with the width of "m". Such stubbornness would be worth a more noble cause.

 > What are you asking about? The quotation marks around a quotation belong
 > to the language of the quoting document,

I regard them as a border between the two, and I don’t see a reason--beyond
typographic convenience--to prefer the language of the first document for
them.

It's a matter of orthography, not typography. Quotation marks are part of a language, not in some no man's land between languages.

Note also that ten years ago, citations in US books from English-language
sources that didn’t use US spelling conventions would be respelled without
a second thought, and vice versa. This is changing with more exposure to
typeset matter from the other tradition.

Or perhaps due to the fact that people in the US are becoming better aware of the existence of language forms other than US English. But quoting British English in a text in US English can hardly be characterized as a _foreign-language_ quotation.

 > [...] 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’s not surely wrong, when there is no universal convention for the
behaviour in question.

Universal civilized treatment of foreign languages requires that they be written according to their own rules as far as technically possible. We don't need universal rules for punctuation. It suffices that there are official established rules for the language used, whether in quotation or elsewhere. If you can use dashes, it is surely wrong to use an em dash without spaces for a purported quotation in a language with a rule on using an en dash with spaces.

If it’s conformant to house style, and there’s no more universally accepted
convention, then it can’t be ‘wrong.’

Of course it can. House styles can be wrong, as any style. For example, if a house style requires the omission of diacritic marks from foreign names especially in languages where they are distinctive and important, then the style is just wrong. Any norm can be considered in the light of a more fundamental norm, up to the level of ultimate values such as respect for other people, languages, and cultures.

Well, sufficent sources would ideally prove that your stated norm for
civilised language isn’t observed in actuality,

First, that would not prove it. Most people break the norm that forbids stealing, at least in small scale and there is no risk of getting caught; this does not make the norm "do not steal" wrong.

Second, no sources have been cited to show that the norm is not observed in actuality. I am sure that such sources exist, too, but it's really not my task to find them, even though my opponents keep finding sources that support _my_ view.
.

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