From: Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko (sasha1@netcom.com)
Date: Sun Jan 26 1997 - 23:53:43 MST
Another grammatical issue:
There is a funny rule in American English, that punctuation marks should be
inserted
inside the quotation marks, as in: [ I know words "green," " blue," and
"red". ] Here
the connections *between* semantic objects "green" "blue" "red" (quotes
are parts of these objects!) are somehow put *inside* these objects! This
looks like some collective
grammatical insanity. I wonder if any other language shares this (Russian
doesn't,
and neither does any of the programming languages I know - computers would
go crazy
trying to parse it).
The phrase that I would like to see here is [ I know words "green", "
blue", and "red". ]
This can be even more visible in a sentence: [ I know punctuation marks
",," ";," and ".."]
- instead of natural [ I know punctuation marks ",", ";", and ".".]
I just sent this question to Richard Lederer, and he told me he doesn't
like the rule
either, and that the Brits don't have it.
I wonder what you think of this rule...
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Alexander Chislenko Home page: <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html>
Firefly Website recommendations: <http://my.yahoo.com> ---> "Firefly"
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