Re: Bug#235759: Comentar on which replacement for German quotes
GOTO Masanori wrote:
> At Mon, 29 Mar 2004 04:23:37 -0500,
> Nathanael Nerode wrote:
>> > as a German native speaker with some interest on typography but
>> > virtually no knowledge on UTF-8 some comments:
>> >
>> > The common quotes in German today are
>> > double open quotes (low position) U201E
>> > together with
>> > double closed quote (high position) U201C
>> >
>> > The current conversion
>> > ,,text"
>> > looks strange because the opening quotes don't match the closing
>> > quotes.
>> I would make an effort to avoid any conversion which is asymmetrical in
>> length, for any language, actually. I hate when info documents say
>> ``foo", for instance...
>
> So are ,,text'' and ``foo'' reasonable?
Well, although I said "no", I admit that they are better than ,,text" and
``foo", because they don't have the asymmetry...
They are unreasonable, however, for *different* reasons. In English, "foo"
should be used when curly quotes are unavailable, not ``foo''. ("`" and "'"
make a crummy pair of quotes, even though TeX uses them.)
In German, >>foo<< (or was it <<foo>> ?) should be used when the curly
quotes are unavailable (using real guillemets, not greater-than and
less-than signs), as all the Germans were saying. ,,text'' might be
reasonable if the guillemets aren't available, but >>foo<< (or was it
<<foo>>?) might be better because it's less likely to be confusing -- and
"foo" might be the best of all, because it's almost certainly not
confusing.
The point is that retaining meaning should take priority over retaining
appearance. The current conversions attempt to retain a sort of parody of
the appearance, but are worse at retaining meaning than the alternative
suggested conversions. Imagine if the default conversion for kanji and kana
was ASCII art, and you'll get an idea of why the current conversion just
seems wrong (though it isn't *that* bad).
--
Make sure your vote will count.
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/
Reply to: