Talk:Punctuation

The so-called Harvard comma
I was taught (int nineteengrmphties) to use commas everywhere in a list bar the last item, that is, after the penultimate entry. For example, "beans, peas and barley grow." Nowadays in AmE it is fashionable to use that last comma, as in "beans, peas, and barley grow." My linguistic dinosaur thinks that is a travesty of English as she ought to be writ, but I am not consistent in applying this rule any more. Will 17:52, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Well it's a problem of English not having a governing body. There are various style guides to which one can refer, but their instructions tend to be inconsistent with each other. --Bob M 18:09, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
 * "I'd like to to thank my parents, Madonna and the Pope" is one classic example I memorized from Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Human 23:04, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Having checked various style guides I can't find one which recommends a comma before the final "and".--Bob M 08:16, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Aha! The notorious Oxford comma, so named 'cos Oxford University Press uses it. In most cases I reckon it's superfluous but I have come across a couple of instances in which it seemed natural and necessary to use it myself to avoid a possible ambiguity. Larry Trask, as a US linguist who lived & worked in the UK, is yer man here: "In most British usage, no comma is used before the word and or or, unless such a comma is required to avoid ambiguity..." and "... in American English, it is usual - though not universal -..." Mind the Gaffe: The Penguin Guide to Common Errors in English (2001), ISBN 0-14-051476-7 --Technopat 08:44, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Ahem!
"Single quotation marks ‘...’ are more common in British English: ‘Nice oak table,’ he said." ORLY? (not where I come from they're not.)Toast 03:35, 21 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm not to sure about that either. So I've cut it below:
 * Single quotation marks ‘...’ are more common in British English: ‘Nice oak table,’ he said.
 * Any other thoughts?--Bob M 10:41, 21 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I've used hash instead of i, ii, etc and reformatted most of it to give some consistency. (also included "I didn't expect the &hellip; &hellip;") tee hee. Toast 14:55, 21 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I've never (as far as I can recall) seen *** used as an ellipsis. Toast 15:23, 21 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Me neither, and I can't seem to find a reference for it. I've cut it.--Bob M 15:31, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

I
Don't like the NYT ref: you have to register to see it. WP has a shorter explanation: "Capitalisation of the word began around 1250 to clarify the single letter as constituting a full word: writers and copyists began to use a capital I because the lower-case letter was hard to read, and sometimes mistaken for part of the previous or succeeding word." I didn't know that. (actually I'd never thought about that - just taken it for granted: you're never too old to learn.) I think it (WP) sounds reasonable: do any other languages have a single letter pronoun? Toast 16:44, 21 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Do you have to register to see the NYT article? I didn't. Maybe  I registered some time ago and my browser remembered. NYT article says the English is unique.


 * Why do we capitalize the word “I”? There’s no grammatical reason for doing so, and oddly enough, the majuscule “I” appears only in English.


 * Other interesting paragraphs:


 * England is where the capital “I” first reared its dotless head. In Old and Middle English, when “I” was still “ic,” “ich” or some variation thereof — before phonetic changes in the spoken language led to a stripped-down written form — the first-person pronoun was not majuscule in most cases. The generally accepted linguistic explanation for the capital “I” is that it could not stand alone, uncapitalized, as a single letter, which allows for the possibility that early manuscripts and typography played a major role in shaping the national character of English-speaking countries.


 * “Graphically, single letters are a problem,” says Charles Bigelow, a type historian and a designer of the Lucida and Wingdings font families. “They look like they broke off from a word or got lost or had some other accident.” When “I” shrunk to a single letter, Bigelow explains, “one little letter had to represent an important word, but it was too wimpy, graphically speaking, to carry the semantic burden, so the scribes made it bigger, which means taller, which means equivalent to a capital.”


 * The growing “I” became prevalent in the 13th and 14th centuries, with a Geoffrey Chaucer manuscript of “The Canterbury Tales” among the first evidence of this grammatical shift. Initially, distinctions were made between graphic marks denoting an “I” at the beginning of a sentence versus a midphrase first-person pronoun. Yet these variations eventually fell by the wayside, leaving us with our all-purpose capital “I,” a potent change apparently made for simplicity’s sake.

--Bob M 17:21, 21 October 2009 (UTC)