Quote…quote?

Volume 7, Issue 180; 04 Oct 2004; last modified 08 Oct 2010

Bad typography, or a locale convention?

I was struckNo, I don’t mean that kind of “struck”. Ah, the felicity of English. I mean I noticed it, but that doesn’t sound as dramatic. by this sign on a tram in Basel, CH.

It looks wrong to my eyes. Either of „this“ or “this” would have been expected, but “this“? Typographic error or locale convention?

Comments

As a Swiss citizen, I can assure you that quotes are normally written as you would expect them. If different quotes are used, it's «this» or sometimes »this« – I don't know the exact typorgraphic convention here, though.

BTW: Enjoy your stay in Switzerland!

Regards
Johann

Typographical error. I'm mystified as to how it happened; no "smart quotes" engine I'm aware of would produce that. Someone must have decided to do it that way.

I suspect that whoever typeset that knows that both opening and closing quotes in English are high (as opposed to the German convention of low-9 opening, high-6 closing), but didn't have the proper high-9 available, so used high-6 for both opening and closing. Think of it as typographical Engrish.

Here's a concise summary of quotation rules for various languages:

English/Dutch/Italian/Portuguese/Spanish/Turkish: high-6 to high-9
German/Czech/Slovak: low-9 to high-6, or guillemets pointing in
Danish/Finnish/Norwegian/Swedish: high-9 to high-9, or guillemets pointing right
Hungarian/Polish: low-9 to high-9, or guillemets pointing right
French/Greek/Russian: guillemets pointing out
Slovenian: guillemets pointing in

This is documented on pages 156-58 of The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0, available online as pages 11-13 of http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch06.pdf , along with the CJK styles (too complex for this comment).

Ha! You wrote „this.” Didn't you want to write „this,“ or did you expect Hungarian/Polish style in Switzerland?
I had this “What did they do with the quotes”-feeling in a (dubbed) movie last Friday. It had some text overlays, sometimes quoting like „this” and sometimes like „this!“