Re: Punctuation character (inverted interrobang) proposed

From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Mon Sep 05 2005 - 18:40:13 CDT

  • Next message: Patrick Andries: "Re: Punctuation character (inverted interrobang) proposed"

    Michael Everson wrote:

    > At 14:55 -0700 2005-09-05, John Hudson wrote:
    >
    >> So, do these communities use it in TeX? Patrick was presumably asking
    >> whether they use it at all.
    >
    >
    > I don't know, John. TeX developers saw fit to create the character and
    > name it, and put it into their implementations.
    >
    > Sometimes we add characters because they HAVE been used. Sometimes we
    > add characters so that they CAN be used. I don't have any problem with
    > this. Some people do.

    FWIW (WAM)*, I quote from the manual of Makor, a Hebrew typesetting
    package for use with TeX:

    >
    > By and large, Israeli punctuation matches that of the rest of the
    > world. One difference from American grammar is the frequent occurence
    > of the sequence `?!' to indicate some level of amazed incredulity.
    > Just for fun, I have included in my Hebrew fonts the `interrobang'
    > symbol ‽, which you can get by typing either !? or ?!. Perhaps this
    > symbol will now sweep the world of Hebrew typesetting by storm‽

    It does seem to be true that Israeli typesetting uses ?! more frequently
    than proper English typesetting does. So I guess it's not necessarily
    so "ungrammatical" to everyone.

    ~mark

    * "WAM" == "Which Ain't Much"



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