Quotation mark

The single quotation mark is traced to Ancient Greek practice, adopted and adapted by monastic copyists.

Our copyists place this sign in the books of the people of the Church, to separate or to indicate the quotations drawn from the Holy Scriptures.

[6] In his edition of the works of Aristotle, which appeared in 1483 or 1484, the Milanese Renaissance humanist Francesco Filelfo marked literal and appropriate quotes with oblique double dashes on the left margin of each line.

[citation needed] In Central Europe, the practice was to use the quotation mark pairs with the convexity aimed inward.

[citation needed] Sweden (and Finland) choose a convention where the convexity of both marks was aimed to the right but lined up both at the top level: ”...”.

[11] A tendency to use single quotation marks in British writing is thought to have arisen after the mid-19th century invention of steam-powered presses and the consequent rise of London and New York as distinct, industrialized publishing centers whose publishing houses adhered to separate norms.

English, Australia or ‘...’ gæsalappir (‘goose feet’) Historically, „...“ (German-stlye quotes) was used in Latvian in the first half of 20th century.

Contemporary Bulgarian employs the em dash or the quotation dash (the horizontal bar) followed by a space character at the beginning of each direct-speech segment by a different character in order to mark direct speech in prose and in most journalistic question and answer interviews; in such cases, the use of standard quotation marks is left for in-text citations or to mark the names of institutions, companies, and sometimes also brand or model names.

This style of quoting is also used in Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Georgian, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovene and in Ukrainian.

The angle shape was introduced later to make them easier to distinguish from apostrophes, commas and parentheses in handwritten manuscripts submitted to publishers.

Compare: For clarity, some newspapers put nested quoted material in italics: The French Imprimerie nationale (cf.

Lexique des règles typographiques en usage à l'Imprimerie nationale, presses de l'Imprimerie nationale, Paris, 2002) does not use different quotation marks for nesting quotes: In this case, when there should be two adjacent opening or closing marks, only one is written: The use of English quotation marks is increasing in French and usually follows English rules, for instance in situations when the keyboard or the software context doesn't allow the use of guillemets.

Guillemet marks pointing outwards are used for definitions (mainly in scientific publications and dictionaries), as well as for enclosing spoken lines and indirect speech, especially in poetic texts.

— Osioł — powtórzył kowal takim tonem, jakby wyzywał gościa, żeby spróbował sobie z niego zażartować.

[original English version is "Bad Ass", but that's not a common phrase in Polish] “Stupid—?” “Donkey,” repeated the blacksmith, his tone defying anyone to make something of it.

They are the Latin tradition quotation marks, normally used by typographers, and are also the usual style in reference sources,[60][77][78] as well as on some websites dedicated to the Portuguese language.

Example in Russian: Пушкин писал Дельвигу: «Жду „Цыганов“ и тотчас тисну».

Один мій знайомий поет і літературознавець якось жартуючи сказав: “Я волію читати словники, ніж поеми.

Це сказано жартома, але “читати словники” — не така вже дивовижна і дивацька річ, як може здатися».

Corner brackets are well-suited for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, because they accommodate vertical and horizontal writing equally well.

Another typographical style is to omit quotation marks for lines of dialogue, replacing them with an initial dash, as in lines from James Joyce's Ulysses: This style is particularly common in Bulgarian, French, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

Some examples include: In Italian, Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Georgian, Romanian, Lithuanian and Hungarian, a reporting clause in the middle of a quotation is marked by a dash on each side of it.

In Finnish, on the other hand, the beginning of a reporting clause is marked only by the punctuation already existing in the sentence, or (if there was none) by adding a comma.

The ASCII character set, which has been used on a wide variety of computers since the 1960s, contains the straight versions only (U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE and U+0022 " QUOTATION MARK).

Before Unicode was widely accepted and supported, this meant representing the curved quotes in whatever 8-bit encoding the software and underlying operating system was using.

The character sets for Windows and Macintosh used two different pairs of values for curved quotes, while ISO 8859-1 (historically the default character set for the Unixes and older Linux systems) has no curved quotes, making cross-platform and -application compatibility difficult.

Performance by these "smart quotes" features was far from perfect overall (variance potential by e.g. subject matter, formatting/style convention, user typing habits).

As many word processors (including Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org) have the function enabled by default, users may not have realized that the ASCII-compatible straight quotes they were typing on their keyboards ended up as something different (conversely users could incorrectly assume its functioning in other applications, e.g. composing emails).

In Windows file and folder names, the straight double quotation mark is prohibited, as it is a reserved character.

[105] They all have general category "Punctuation", and a subcategory Open, Close, Initial, Final or Other (Ps, Pe, Pi, Pf, Po).