Subject: Re: submitting an ID

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 10:12:38 -0500 (EST)

> From: Edward Lewis <[email-masked]>

    > When I was in school, I was taught to quote multiple paragraphs with
    > quotes at the start of each and a closing quote only at the end of the
    > final paragraph.

Yeah, but geeks like us love to have their syntactic elements balance, so I
suspect most of us prefer the matching quotation marks! :-) (This is probably
mostly because of our work with computer languages, where such rules prevail -
but also because of our natural love of logic and order! :-)

Besides, language isn't static anyway (although the advent of writing, and
especially widespread printing, certainly seems to have slowed down the
evolution), and "rule"-books for language should really be thought of as being
more akin to guide-books.

	Noel

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From: "Eastlake III Donald-LDE008" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 10:57:16 -0500

Ditto whether commas and periods should be moved inside quotes when they
are not actually part of the quoted material. When that quoted material
is code or some critical literal string, this silly  rule, which was
actually prompted by typographic considerations of appearance, not only
makes little sense but actually breaks things.

There is no evidence that writing and/or printing have particularly
slowed down the evolution of language. While it is hard to say how
quickly pre-historic languages changed and vocabulary changes faster
than grammar, all living languages appear to evolve and after around 500
to 1000 years have usually changed so much that the old version is
virtually unintelligible to those who do not make it a special item of
study. A book I would recommend on this topic is "The Unfolding of
Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention".

Donald

-----Original Message-----
From: Noel Chiappa [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 10:13 AM
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: submitting an ID

    > quotes at the start of each and a closing quote only at the end of
the

Yeah, but geeks like us love to have their syntactic elements balance,
so I suspect most of us prefer the matching quotation marks! :-) (This
is probably mostly because of our work with computer languages, where
such rules prevail - but also because of our natural love of logic and
order! :-)

Besides, language isn't static anyway (although the advent of writing,
and especially widespread printing, certainly seems to have slowed down
the evolution), and "rule"-books for language should really be thought
of as being more akin to guide-books.

	Noel