Punctuation - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
  • neidu3@sh.itjust.worksMEnglish
    21·
    13 天前

    ¿

    When reading out loud it’s helpful to know right away that the sentence you’re starting is a question.

    • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      11·
      13 天前

      I really like that in a longer sentence, you can tell exactly where the question part starts.

      That would be a good feature to have, ¿ wouldn’t it?

  • doleo@lemmy.oneEnglish
    8·
    13 天前

    English would benefit from using tilde and other inflection marks, especially to help non natives predict syllable stress.

    Having words from multiple languages integrated into English means it’s difficult to predict how words will be pronounced.

  • otp@sh.itjust.works
    5·
    13 天前

    To express a range of numbers, Korean (and likely other Asian languages) will use a tilde instead of a dash or hyphen. To me, that better expresses that we’re talking about an indeterminate value or a range. Especially when we use ~ for “about”, as in ~$20 for something that costs $17.99 before tax, for example.

    Dining out costs like 20~40 dollars per person!

    Whereas “20-40” looks too similar to a subtraction equation or a hyphenated word to me.

    • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      3·
      13 天前

      USA English also uses ~ before a number to signify “about” in informal contexts. “It costs ~$20”.

      Chemistry has a weird one for this: “ca. 20 mL” means “about 20 mL” and I never found out why.

    • 404@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      13 天前

      In properly formatted text, you use en dash for ranges.

      En dash: 20–40

      Hyphen: 20-40

      Some (most?) modern text editors will substitute two hyphens with an en dash, so you can easily generate them by typing --.

      (I get your point though! Just wanted to point out that there are much nicer and more appropriate glyphs than the hyphen.)

      • Classy@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        13 天前

        En dash is very useful for

        Dates (3–20–25)
        Subtraction (although I think math script uses its own unique dash?) (7 – 1 = 6)
        Value ranges ($20–40)

        Then of course there’s the beautiful—and slightly different—em dash!

  • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
    3·
    13 天前

    Pause interrogatives and interrogative starting marks - aka ,? and ¿

    Interrogative starting marks are extremely useful for clarity and pause interrogatives better align with natural speech.

    Eh buddy, me and Bob were thinking of heading down to Timmes. ¿Do you want to come,? there’s a sale on the chili.

  • otacon239@lemmy.world
    3·
    13 天前

    I’ve always liked § and ¶. I also don’t see people using ≈ and ~ in context enough. They’re fun to write.

    Edit: Almost forgot this guy, too: ‽

    • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      2·
      13 天前

      I like the equals sign with three lines to mean “x is defined to be y.”

      I’m not sure if a ≈ with three lines already has a meaning, but if it doesn’t, maybe it should mean “x is defined as similar to y.”

        • OfCourseNot@fedia.io
          1·
          13 天前

          Spanish has opening question and exclamation marks, you would put this inverted interrobang at the beginning of your questclanation as in ‘⸘Por qué no los dos‽’.

  • MicrowavedTea@infosec.pub
    2·
    13 天前

    A parentheses-like mark to group parts of a sentence when it’s not clear which part a word belongs to. An example I saw lately that may not translate very well: “You are required to arrive an hour early so there’s time to do x, do y and do z”. Are you required to do y and z or do you just need the extra time to do them? You can usually tell from context but this type of mixup does happen sometimes.

    • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      2·
      13 天前

      In English I’m not sure how you could interpret that sentence in a way where you didn’t have to do y or z, but it is unclear whether it is just x that takes a long time, or if all three things do.

      • MicrowavedTea@infosec.pub
        2·
        13 天前

        Yeah it’s not a great example, the difference could be on whether you’d have to do y and z before getting there or they’d give you the materials to do them on the spot. Say signing a form they provide vs finding it, printing it and bringing it with you.

  • cabinet_sanchez@midwest.socialEnglish
    2·
    13 天前

    One of my crabby old person pet peeves is kids these days ending statements with question marks? I get that they’re afraid of periods and they don’t want to look like my generation using ellipses constantly (which I am glad about), but half the time I cannot tell if someone is asking a question or making a statement and randomly using a question mark, and it can very much change the meaning of their comment. We need something more open-ended for these people.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
    2·
    13 天前

    I wish we had either a single grammatical notation or some kind of special encapsulation to denote sarcasm, because I just hate how “/s” looks. Especially in a hand written paper. It is 100% an internetism and it shows. Most people probably don’t even know why there is a forward slash in it. Lemmings probably do, but most of us are internet gremlins so of course we’d know.

    • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      2·
      13 天前

      If you said “doch” in response to that question, how would you translate what happened to an English speaker?