this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Arrrr, I'm here t' make replicas o' all yer punctuation!
Avast, wher' be th' interrobang!?
Seriously though, while this post is cute, let's remember not everyone speaks English as a first language, and while many languages do use the English Alphabet, many do not and so there are still quite a few people unfamiliar with the proper English punctuation.
That's great and all, but for those of us that do speak English and are expecting certain grammatical norms, eschewing those norms, regardless of the validity of the reason, makes it significantly harder for us to parse.
The question mark is not a rare piece of punctuation, either. It's used in China. It's used in Japan. It's used in Vietnamese, every Romance language I've ever encountered, and every Germanic language I've ever encountered. I'm not saying I understand all those languages, but I can certainly recognize when someone's asking a question in one because the question mark remains the same.
This is a piss-poor excuse and reeks of the attitude of one who's never encountered a language that doesn't use the Latin Alphabet even in passing. Oh yeah, by the way, it's called the Latin Alphabet, not the English Alphabet.
Not to invalidate the point made, but…
While Japanese indeed uses question marks, you can get screwed if you think that every sentence without a question mark at the end is not a question. For example, this is a grammatically correct question:
それは質問ですか。
for real... the か character I would even go so far as to claim is often MORE prevalent without the question mark.
That's reasonable. I pulled that info from Wikipedia, and I don't speak Japanese, so I just was going off that.
I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Isn't that an argument for the existence of this post? Many don't know this, well, now they do.
I can forgive the incorrect "How to get blah?" sentence formation, but leaving out a question mark (which are common across many languages) makes it look like purposeful clickbait.
I cannot forgive that. English is not a language that allows you to turn a statement into a question just by changing punctuation. This is covered in like day one: "What is your name?"
If you learned English through media and not formal classes, you have even less excuse, because then you should be learning how people talk in the real world, not just formal classroom English.
It's actually pretty common to change a sentence into a question with rising intonation in speech, which is pretty much just adding a question mark.
"Fries." is a statement of what something is or what someone wants. "Fries?" is asking if someone wants fries.
"I said that." is a statement about something someone said. "I said that?" is a question about whether they said something.
Of course, we could add emphasis to any of those three words and end up with 3 different questions.
"I said that?" ... No, I guess it was your partner, not you.
"I said that?" ... Well, you sure IMPLIED it!
"I said that?" ... Yes, verbatim. It's even in the video from last night.
All from changing a "." to a "?" in the sentence "I said that.".
My (non-english) native language uses the question mark, but many don't use it out of lazyness. I don't think this is a local issue. Also, are there really that many languages that do not use a question mark? I would have thought that is the rarity.
Besides, most english content I read on lemmy are not nearly that bad to justify that.
Fun fact: In Greek the question mark is ";".
¿Whaaat?
¿Eres tu, Ramón?
If programming memes have taught me anything, this one is that :D
I have to admit that I would have never imagined it's a different character than the semicolon if I hadn't seen those. That's bad optimization right there!
Interesting additional info: in Greek, the role of the semicolon is played by a floating period ·
Somebody needs to get on deduplicating UTF8 ASAP
The irony of this coming from an American. You guys are so clueless.
Yep, non native speakers get the punctuation right every time. Native speakers whose education system is in the toilet are the real perpetrators 😂
Actually my point was that Americans don't always use "proper English punctuation" since they co-opted the language and then randomly changed a bunch of things for absolutely no reason.
Oh, yeah? I'll show you! How to punctuation.
Is it here‽
You must be rich. 😏
...
Are there any languages that don't have punctuations?
I mean, most languages are not written.