And I thought the green raven piece was for AI basic training, it is all a corvid conspiracy, for which I can only offer ⁋ ¶ ❡
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And here I would tend to assume that “ss” would convert to ß.
(I took a year of German in high school)
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Highly recommend Jonathan Safran Foer’s, “A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease”, originally published in The New Yorker, June 10, 2002, issue. (You can find PDF copies online with a general search of the title.)
It features punctuation marks such as “silence”, “willed silence”, “insistent question mark”, and so on. Then demonstrates each mark with an “example” that is the actual story. Just brilliant writing, and the punctuation marks are very cool, too.
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Is seems English wants to be suspenseful as we go adjective first.
“Big, shiny, red… car?” said Joe.
I think French is generally the opposite. (L’Auto rouge…)
Why question at the end of the sentence?
Reading books to kids is hard when you try to do the voices of the characters.
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Yeah, section signs, daggers and carets seem like strange inclusions as they are very much still in use. (I’d swear I see daggers in recent texts.) In fact, given that the caret is not only getting its original use, but expanded well beyond that - it’s done the opposite of faded. The interobang seems to be getting more use now that it’s in unicode than it got before that (certainly I see it more). The snark mark and maybe the irony punctuation never seemed to take off in the first place, so I don’t know how they faded, exactly… I guess the title only really described a quarter of the list, really.
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I generally type !? rather than ?!. It’s a useful mark in writing dialogue. I’d be glad if a standard could be established.
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sure.
but in the excited question, such as, “right?!”, the question is modified by the exclamation. to me, the question (interro) comes before the bang (exclamation mark).
that is how i ws taught, graphically, typographically and in text.
YMMV, that’s just how i lernt it…
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ALT-S for me, and also ALT-P (¶), but those are my Word keyboard shortcuts.
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Objective-C hijacked @ for some of its syntax because it was the only thing left that C didn’t use.
C had trigraphs for systems that didn’t have full ASCII character set or had keyboards unable to do some of the necessary characters. A reduced set of punctuation was common if you were connected through a lower end typewriter-like teletype that was more suitable for clerical work than scientific work.
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That’s weird, because it’s the same way up as the logical AND (Unicode 2227), which makes it inverted relative to the regular logical OR (Unicode 2228) and the logical XOR. (Unicode 22BB).
And the special symbols for the old IBM
nb the numbers on this wheel are small ones for super/sub scripts.
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has § at code 0x40
ASCII has ‘@’ in the same spot. This was before the advent of email, mind you. But I suppose that American bookkeepers found it useful to have @, and German bureaucrats found it useful to have §
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I think the argument is that it works without the faith indicated because it symbolizes a stake holding a name, an easily recognizable grave marker even in tiny sizes.
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…and <bg> and <beg> (Big Evil Grin), too.
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Arrows, anyone?
➲ ↜ ↝ ⇜ ⇝ ⇞ ⇟ ↞ ↟ ↠ ↡ ⇦ ⇧ ⇨ ⇩ ⇪ ⇋ ⇌
↑ ↓ → ← ↔ ▲ ▼ ► ◄ ↔ 
↚ ↛
↢ ↣ ↤ ↥ ↦ ↧ ↨ ⇤ ⇥
↫ ↬ ↭ ↮ ↯ ↰ ↱ ↲ ↳ ↴ ↵ ↶ ↷ ↸ ↹
↺ ↻ ↼ ↽ ↾ ↿ ⇀ ⇁ ⇂ ⇃
⇄ ⇅ ⇆ ⇇ ⇈ ⇉ ⇊ ⇍ ⇎ ⇏ ⇐ ⇑ ⇒ ⇓ ⇔ ⇕ ⇖
⇗ ⇘ ⇙ ⇚ ⇛ ⇠ ⇡ ⇢ ⇣
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Well, C was born in 1972 and Unicode around 1990, so K&R had to make do with base ASCII, so we are stuck with ^ XOR, & AND, | OR for the bitwise operators (plus && and || for the logical ones).
This is from the 2011 C standard, and the required character set is still the same:
(BTW: The abominable trigraphs, used to replace some of the characters if not available (e.g. ??= for #) have been finally removed in C23.)
The alternative at the time would have meant being like APL, with their totally unique char set (which has the correct symbols for AND ∧, OR ∨, NAND ⍲, NOR ⍱) - with all the drawbacks that choice brings along.
EtA:
A bit more on-topic, I expect in not too many years to read about the demise of that weird, unloved, fading, misunderstood punctuation mark: the semicolon.
Apart from the one in my code snippets, there’s only one in the article and one in the comments.
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The Interrobang is something we really do need. That last one I see being used a lot by those of use posting from phones with predictive text.
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The caret is an everyday thing, it’s even on my phone’s keyboard. Means ‘exponent’ in Excel, or ‘previous comment’ on the internet.
The daggers are still used in informal footnotes after asterisks have been exhausted.
Of all those, I think only the caret and the tilde ever made it onto modern keyboards. .~ seems to have been replaced by /s, which I notice my phone can do – only my PC can do the tilde, which might explain that. Certainly it’s not like there isn’t still a need to indicate snark. Some now use the tilde to mean ‘approximately.’
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As a matter of terminology; is there a convention among linguists about what it means for a punctuation mark to be either ‘in’ or ‘faded from’ a given language?
I’m curious because there seem to be a lot of marks that (just going by ever-reliable feelings of intuition) I wouldn’t think of as being part of the English language or its written representation; just things that would not seem out of place adjacent to written English; but not really of it.
Something like the use of the dagger in a text that needs to be footnoted real hard: it’s not some sort of esoteric head-scratcher to see it; but it’s neither essential to written English nor even essential to footnoting(it doesn’t look at cool; but just using superscript numbers to support an arbitrary number of footnotes can replace any arrangements of asterisks, daggers, double daggers, etc.); something like paragraph and page break symbols(while less replaceable in their own functions) seem to be in a similar boat: quite useful for futzing with the layout of a document written in English; and something a person literate in English would probably know; but there’s a reason why they are control codes that happen to have printable representations, rather than being classified as characters.
Is this something where there are recognized; but somewhat fuzzy categories? Actually quite strict categories? So many clever counterexamples to an attempt to establish categories that categories are regarded as a confusion that amateurs grow out of with further instruction?
Informally, I’d definitely say that something like the case of the exclamation point vs. the interrobang is one of a punctuation mark that’s part of English vs. one that someone tried and failed to make happen; while something like line, paragraph, and page breaks are really more pieces of specialist jargon for talking about text layout that are definitely applicable to English, but not really of it; and things like daggers and double daggers are even more tenuously linked, since the fact that footnotes are a thing may or may not count as being part of English; and since they are totally optional for the implementation of footnotes; but I’m sufficiently ignorant of the actual linguistic question that I’m not even sure how to ask it well enough to find the answer.
some of those characters make sense on a typewriter as overstrikes.
i.e î is i backspace ^.
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