851: Quotation Marks Apr 7, 2017

Much like with capital letters, quotation marks were initially used just to identify what the author felt was particularly important. This mark, which appeared as two lines like || in the margins, could be for anything, not just for quotes. When printing-presses became more common, printers in Central Europe especially started to use curved lines and in the 17th century,the usage of these for quotations became more or less the standard. What was not standard was the appearance of these marks, and this is still the case today. The French, and later Russian, Arabic etc quotation marks: «  » kept the punctuation in the middle, closer to how there were initially hand-written, whereas Germans lowered one and elevated the other: „ “ and kept them pointed inwards. Other countries adopted variations of these such as the Swedish ” ” with both facing the same direction, and the similarly angled „ ” used in parts of Central Europe, not to mention American English's, “ ”. This gets even more varied when alternates are included, as two countries that use the same primary quotation marks may use two different sorts of punctuation when adding in extra quotes, e.g.
I said, "Mr. Smith told his son, 'eat your soup' ".
This sentence which uses American standards would, for instance, have use the opposite quotations (single and double) in the UK.