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PaperclipPerfector  6hr ago (text post)   376 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 1, 2026

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A classic line:

“My son,” said the old Gascon gentleman, in that pure Béarn patois of which Henry IV could never rid himself, “this horse was born in the house of your father about thirteen years ago, and has remained in it ever since, which ought to make you love it.”

What does the original French look like?

―Mon fils, avait dit le gentilhomme gascon—dans ce pur patois de Béarn dont Henri IV n'avait jamais pu parvenir à se défaire—, mon fils, ce cheval est né dans la maison de votre père, il y a tantôt treize ans, et y est resté depuis ce temps-là, ce qui doit vous porter à l'aimer

1,2,3

If you glance through some amateur French stories, it's rather hilarious to see different authors use three different quotation styles—the two illustrated above, plus «guillemets». (What is this, Japanese?) In contrast, amateur English is dominated by the USA's “double quotation marks”, and the British ‘single quotation marks’ have fallen by the wayside. (Some amateur authors use single quotation marks to denote internal monologue, or to differentiate scare quotes from dialog. I find both practices quite annoying.)

1Fun fact: The leading dash used in this quotation style officially is supposed to be, not an em dash (Unicode character 2014), but the separate "horizontal bar/quotation dash" character (2015). The two characters look identical in Arial, though.

2It's time for the daily Two Minutes Hate against translators/localizers/paraphrasers who take unjustified liberties with the source material. "Said" rather than "had said"? "Old gentleman" rather than "gentleman"? Commas rather than em dashes? No repetition of "my son"?

3When you need to add attribution or a footnote to an inline quote, it normally goes after the quote. However, treatment of blockquotes is more complicated. (a) Placing the attribution before the blockquote is inconsistent with the treatment of inline quotes; (b) placing the attribution at the end of (inside) the blockquote makes no sense semantically; and (c) placing the attribution after the blockquote creates an ugly short paragraph. Overall, I am inclined to think that option C is the best and option B is the worst.4The Pennsylvania Supreme Court uses option C. The US Supreme Court uses a weird variation on option B: placing the attribution at the end of (inside) the blockquote, but putting quotation marks around the actually-quoted material, so that what we've been calling a "blockquote" actually is just indentation with no semantic meaning whatsoever. The New Jersey Supreme Court uses a different weird variation on option B: placing the attribution at the end of (inside) the blockquote, but in its own paragraph and enclosed in square brackets. Obviously, both of these variations are better than the basic version of option B (since they eliminate the semantic issue), but still worse than option C.

4There's another topic: Should footnotes be capable of containing multiple paragraphs? The in-progress CSS standard to which I pointed previously allows both single-paragraph (inline) and multi-paragraph (block) footnotes. But the standard footnote notation puts the footnote pseudo-heading inline as part of the first paragraph, implying that there really should not be more paragraphs past the one in which it is embedded. Compare that to the standard section notation, which puts the heading as its own pseudo-paragraph lording it over all the real paragraphs.

Russian usually uses quotation dashes for dialogue and guillemets for internal monologue and nested direct speech. If guillemetted direct speech is broken by the words of the author, it's quotation dashes again, but only if it's surrounded with direct speech on both sides. The full rules for punctuating direct speech with guillemets are so baroque and obscure that I have to keep them open in the browser to consult them when writing, even though I have no problems with punctuation in Russian otherwise.

Here's what the guillemets style looks like:

Alice asked Bob: «What's for dinner?» — «Burgers, — replied Bob and added: — Medium rare». — «Oh, just how I like them! — exclaimed Alice. — Thank you, Bob!» — «My pleasure», — he smiled.

And here's the more common quotation bar style:

Alice asked Bob:

— What's for dinner?

— Burgers, — replied Bob and added: — Medium rare.

— Oh, just how I like them! — exclaimed Alice. — Thank you, Bob!

— My pleasure, — he smiled.

P.S. I actually found an error in my punctuation as I was copying these examples into the comment.

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