Re: Bug#235759: Comentar on which replacement for German quotes
Adrian Bunk wrote:
> Hi,
>
> 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...
> French quotes are relatively uncommon in today's German.
> If you use them, you also have to be aware that in Swiss German the
> French closed quotes are used as opening quotes and vice versa.
Books still seem to be published with the >> << quotes, some of the time
anyway, though I don't think I've seen them in any less formal writing.
Just a data point. ;-)
> Intuitively, I'd have used the English quotes if German quotes are not
> available.
>
> I am a bit surprised that this discussion and all patches sent only
> cover de_DE, although there are altogether three common de_ locales
> plus two others the locales package supports.
> If you fix this issue, it should be properly fixed for all de_ locales.
>
> cu
> Adrian
>
--
Make sure your vote will count.
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/
Reply to: