Minor curiosity: originally, back in old printing days, quotations marks went neither before nor after punctuation marks, but above these, after all, it’s a half-height symbol with empty space below it, and another half-height symbol with empty space above it, so both merged well into a single combined glyph, saving space.
When movable types entered the picture almost no types set had unified quotation+punctuation types, so both were physically distinct symbols that needed a sequence when placed on the printing board. Over time the US mostly settled with punctuation-then-quotation, while most other countries went mostly with quotation-then-punctuation—which on further analysis (and then with programming languages) proved more sensible.
Nowadays with modern Unicode ligatures we could easily go back to quotation-over-punctuation for display purposes, while allowing the writing to be either way, but I suppose after 200 years of printing these glyphs separately no one has much interest in that.
I’ve always thought the British style puts an awkward amount of space between a comma or period and the word preceding it. It’s even worse if you start using it with American-style double quotes.
Interesting discussion here on blog of the Chicago Manual of Style, which supports the American convention:
But notice how the commas and the period in the example of Chicago style appear consistently right next to the words they follow [...], creating a pleasing uniformity along the baseline. In British style, placement is interrupted by the quotation marks, though the gap is smaller than it would be with double rather than single marks.
Personally, I alternate between the two styles like a total maniac.
Minor curiosity: originally, back in old printing days, quotations marks went neither before nor after punctuation marks, but above these, after all, it’s a half-height symbol with empty space below it, and another half-height symbol with empty space above it, so both merged well into a single combined glyph, saving space.
When movable types entered the picture almost no types set had unified quotation+punctuation types, so both were physically distinct symbols that needed a sequence when placed on the printing board. Over time the US mostly settled with punctuation-then-quotation, while most other countries went mostly with quotation-then-punctuation—which on further analysis (and then with programming languages) proved more sensible.
Nowadays with modern Unicode ligatures we could easily go back to quotation-over-punctuation for display purposes, while allowing the writing to be either way, but I suppose after 200 years of printing these glyphs separately no one has much interest in that.
I’ve always thought the British style puts an awkward amount of space between a comma or period and the word preceding it. It’s even worse if you start using it with American-style double quotes.
Interesting discussion here on blog of the Chicago Manual of Style, which supports the American convention:
Personally, I alternate between the two styles like a total maniac.
I personally think quotation-over-punctuation would solve this nicely. Here’s an example from someone who managed to have his TeX documents do exactly that: