2676: Goose”s Eyes: Humorous Scandinavian Quotation Marks Apr 19, 2024

British English and American English have different words for the same punctuation, like “period/full stop”, “parentheses/brackets” or “quotation marks/inverted commas”. Bearing in mind on the last example British English uses only one apostrophe for a quote, they’re all basically plain descriptions of function.

The Scandinavians, meanwhile, are equally as divided, but along different lines, namely, whether they are goose-eyes (gåseøjne in Danish / in Norwegian gåseauge), goose-feet (gæsalappir in Icelandic/ Gänsefüßchen in German). In Swedish it is bunny ears (kaninöron). These are not the only way of calling them (e.g Norwegian’s more formal “anførselstegn”), but they are all used regularly.

Aside from the division on which cute names to use, every single example above writes quotation marks differently to each other, and different from English. Some of these have secondary forms for quotes within quotes, but the primary versions are as follows:

Denmark: »...«

Iceland : „ “

Norway: «…»

Sweden: ” ” (Double right)

2513: I Longum: ꟾ Oct 29, 2021

Latin vowels used to be written with apexes, which looked more like traditional accent mark than the macrons used for writing out long vowels in Latin today. This was the only form of punctuation, if it can even be called that, sine historically Latin had no lower-case, no spaces words or breaks for sentences. The only other variable in this system was 'i longum' or 'long i', written as ꟾ which represented the long vowel but didn't take the accent mark. While it is true that J developed from I, it is more accurate to say that J developed from ꟾ. Moreover, in Latin orthography, if two i's would be written together, the second would be ꟾ to distinguish it from N or even U (V). Likewise, in Dutch, there is a common digraph for the long [iː] sound written as IJ, and often further stylized with a smaller i in front, sometimes written as Y, though the Y was not related historically.

2447: Dagger Mark † Aug 23, 2021

The dagger mark (†), also known as a obelus, or as an obelisk has been used for a variety of purposes since antiquity. Now, this symbol indicates death, especially in German language contexts, but it also acts as a secondary footnote marker when an asterisk (*) has already been used. It originated as a line (–) or with two dots (÷) as a way to indicate language that was dubious and may need to be cut, with the specific imagery representing a spit or a spitroast. Later, it was used for the end of a marked passage, and then gaining its use in footnotes, to be followed by a tertiary (‡). Between all these uses, especially in religious literature and symbols for cantillation it was used extensively in medieval Christians, but it never has had explicit reference to Christianity or crucifixes. Still, today many falsely intuit a religious connection.

2404: @ in Hebrew and German Jul 19, 2021

The modern Hebrew word for the @ symbol is שטרודל (strudel), as in the German dessert. This is coincidental that both the pastry and the symbol are from the same name, but in German, and also Yiddish whence the Hebrew derives, this literally means 'whirlpool' and is supposed to be reminiscent of something twisting and spinning. In German, the word for the @ symbol is 'der Klammeraffe' which means 'spider monkey', though 'Klammer' on its own does not mean 'spider' but rather 'bracket'.

2292: Ellipses around the World Mar 26, 2021

While the function of punctuation is the same across the board , there are many different styles that these take around the globe. In the case of ellipses (...), these are generally used to indicate that text is missing or otherwise abbreviated, and in German these are used even for an omitted letter. Sometimes the style is different, such as whether to include an exclamation point or question mark before as in the Russian (!..) (?..) or after. Japanese ellipses are elevated from the line instead and use 6 dots rather than 3; Chinese also uses 6 dots, but in 2 sets of 3 with a space. Other languages ditch the dots altogether and have separate symbols like in Thai (ฯ) or Laotian (ຯ). Mongolian, which in its traditional script writes top to bottom uses vertical ellipses of 4 dots (᠁).

2089: Original Meaning of Comma, Period, and Colon | Sep 3, 2020

Today, commas, periods, and colons are all terms for punctuation, but this was not any of their original senses, looking back at those words’ histories. Indeed, all of them were rhetorical terms or used for poetry. A comma in Latin referred to a short phrase, line of a poem, or a clause of a sentence; period referred a complete sentence or “full pause”, and colon just referred to a part of a poem, and comes from Greek, literally ‘limb’. Of those, ‘colon’ has likely changed the most, as it referred to far more substantial divisions than it does now.

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1462: Islamic State vs Islamic Republic Dec 12, 2018

Even though the two may be used somewhat interchangeably in lay conversations, there is an understood difference between an 'Islamic state' and an 'Islamic republic'. The former refers to a country that has Sharia as its constitution in some respect, and includes country like Saudi Arabia. In this way, on a state-level the country is Islamic, and usually this will exclude democratic elections. Meanwhile, an Islamic republic may also involve Islam on a legislative level, but it will also include more elections. Ultimately however, there is a great deal of overlaps, and these are just norms for usage.
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