The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

Punctuation in other languages
Dots and dashes, interrobangs and cat’s claws

Is it just me, or does this sentence look a little odd?

<<¿But how much is that doggie in

the window?>> demanded Claudine.

There’s something about it . . . but what?

Aha! It looks strange because it’s using punctuation marks that come from languages other than English.

What? Even the punctuation is different?

That’s right. Like anything to do with language, different groups of people have different ways of doing things. If you go snooping inside the font options on your computer, you’ll discover several unusual kinds of punctuation from other languages that you may not have seen before. In Japanese, for example, the period is a tiny circle that is not filled in o ; while in Hebrew it’s a little black diamond ◆ . In Chinese, there’s a special tear-shaped comma that you use when you are making a list.

Have a look at the sentence on page 62 again, and let’s see how sharp your snooping skills are. What do you notice? Yes, you got it! There are question marks at both the beginning and end of the question. Not only that, the question mark at the beginning ¿ is upside down. This is what you’d find if you looked at a book printed in Spanish. In an Arabic book, you might see the same question mark as in English, but pointing in the other direction. In a Greek book, there’s a different sign altogether, what we call a semicolon ; .

But what about those other funny signs? << >> They’re the quotation marks. You’ll also find them in languages such as Russian, French, and Finnish.

In some languages, they like their quotation marks so much they even give them nicknames. In Icelandic, they’re called “goose feet”; in Turkish, “fingernail marks”; and in Hungarian, “cat’s claws.”

In English-speaking countries, printers and proofreaders who work with punctuation marks all the time (and get sick of saying the same words over and over again) have already thought of some good nicknames for them:

Question Mark—eh (as in “Eh? What did you say?”)

Exclamation Mark—bang, screamer, gasper, startler

Asterisk—splat

Hmm, what nickname can you think of for a comma? Or a colon?