Bad typography, or a locale convention?

I was struck[A+] by this sign on a tram in Basel, CH.

[Photo]

The Art of Quoting?

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

Posted by jr on 05 Oct 2004 @ 12:43pm UTC #

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.

Posted by Dorothea Salo on 05 Oct 2004 @ 04:25pm UTC #

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).

Posted by John Cowan on 05 Oct 2004 @ 05:24pm UTC #

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!“

Posted by Martin Kretzschmar on 05 Oct 2004 @ 07:15pm UTC #
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