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What sorts of punctuation do you wish existed, or were in common use in your language?
(en.wikipedia.org)
I feel like the interrobang ‽ is highly underutilised.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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Wow I wonder if I can even find it on the keyboard‽
took quite a while lol.
¿
When reading out loud it's helpful to know right away that the sentence you're starting is a question.
Not even spaniards use them in nonformal written format my dude.
I really like that in a longer sentence, you can tell exactly where the question part starts.
That would be a good feature to have, ¿ wouldn't it?
Punctuation to mark sarcasm would be rather helpful in text.
A sarcastimark, if you will
sure it would
Yeah, no one's come up with one⸮ Even if they did, it probably wouldn't make it into Unicode. 🙄
😁
That's a fabulous idea ⇅
Reddit had /s.
I like yours better but can't figure out how to input it.
I cut and pasted it from https://coolsymbol.com/. I imagine that there is a more direct way involving unicode, but I don't know about that on my phone.
I would love a combination of "?" and ",". This would allow me to mark a specific part of a sentence as a question.
I've done this before. Example
I was going somewhere yesterday, the bank?, when I saw....
It's also fun to interject bangs into sentences too
I was so convinced that I was going to die!, but I ended up just fine.
Ultimately, I feel that if language is descriptive and not ambiguous it is legitimate English.
A sentence which embeds a question is a run-on sentence.
We speak in run-on sentences.
You're a run-on sentence!
As someone with ADHD you have no idea how correct you are.
If I understand @[email protected]'s comment elsewhere in this thread properly, I think that's what a pause interrogative may be. I also agree with them that it (and the interrogative start) does better fit some ways of speaking.
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To express a range of numbers, Korean (and likely other Asian languages) will use a tilde instead of a dash or hyphen. To me, that better expresses that we're talking about an indeterminate value or a range. Especially when we use ~ for "about", as in ~$20 for something that costs $17.99 before tax, for example.
Dining out costs like 20~40 dollars per person!
Whereas "20-40" looks too similar to a subtraction equation or a hyphenated word to me.
≈ is what my math classes use
USA English also uses ~ before a number to signify "about" in informal contexts. "It costs ~$20".
Chemistry has a weird one for this: "ca. 20 mL" means "about 20 mL" and I never found out why.
Circa?
It is circa, but I like to think it's "chemist's approximately"
Maybe, I usually only hear that in relation to time / maybe I'm not remembering it right, or maybe chemists apply it to amounts as well
Same, but it does mean 'around' or 'approximately', so would still work in this context.
In properly formatted text, you use en dash for ranges.
En dash: 20–40
Hyphen: 20-40
Some (most?) modern text editors will substitute two hyphens with an en dash, so you can easily generate them by typing --.
(I get your point though! Just wanted to point out that there are much nicer and more appropriate glyphs than the hyphen.)
En dash is very useful for
Dates (3–20–25)
Subtraction (although I think math script uses its own unique dash?) (7 – 1 = 6)
Value ranges ($20–40)
Then of course there's the beautiful—and slightly different—em dash!
Pause interrogatives and interrogative starting marks - aka ,? and ¿
Interrogative starting marks are extremely useful for clarity and pause interrogatives better align with natural speech.
Eh buddy, me and Bob were thinking of heading down to Timmes. ¿Do you want to come,? there's a sale on the chili.
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I’ve always liked § and ¶. I also don’t see people using ≈ and ~ in context enough. They’re fun to write.
Edit: Almost forgot this guy, too: ‽
I like the equals sign with three lines to mean "x is defined to be y."
I'm not sure if a ≈ with three lines already has a meaning, but if it doesn't, maybe it should mean "x is defined as similar to y."
One of my crabby old person pet peeves is kids these days ending statements with question marks? I get that they're afraid of periods and they don't want to look like my generation using ellipses constantly (which I am glad about), but half the time I cannot tell if someone is asking a question or making a statement and randomly using a question mark, and it can very much change the meaning of their comment. We need something more open-ended for these people.
I tend to use "..?" for that purpose. Haven't had any complaints as of yet.
I would love a certainess punctuation. I had a DND character based on the less wrong forum that added percentages of certainess of things they've learned.
So like "the wizard says he is 20. [30%]" and "the wizard says he is a wizard [90%]"
Yes!
I wish English had a word like the German "doch," to answer questions like "you're not afraid?"
If you said "doch" in response to that question, how would you translate what happened to an English speaker?
"Doch" is used to negate a negative question. So basically you are saying "Yes, I am afraid.", but in one word. (Or is the correct negation "No, I am afraid."? It's really very confusing in English.)
You could say either yes or no in that context, but it would be more clear to just answer affirmatively with "I'm afraid."
English actualy did have terms for that, they just got a bit bastardised with "yea" and "nay" dropping out of common speech:
Will they not go? — Yes, they will.
Will they not go? — No, they will not.
Will they go? — Yea, they will.
Will they go? — Nay, they will not.
That's neat. Makes me wonder, if we had another word for Nein in German as well at some point. If so, I'm sad we dropped it.
It's always nice to learn the ways English and German diverged at some point, like English dropping the -st ending for verbs for the second person singular. I. e. "thou hast" ("du hast"), "thou thinkest" ("du denkst").
It's also used a frightening amount for counter-arguments. Which I personally hat, since it just kills the conversation. Well unless it's already in deeply opinionated context such as this.
"You shouldn't eat ice cream with a fork." "Doch! (I strongly think the previous statement should be true)"
A parentheses-like mark to group parts of a sentence when it's not clear which part a word belongs to. An example I saw lately that may not translate very well: "You are required to arrive an hour early so there's time to do x, do y and do z". Are you required to do y and z or do you just need the extra time to do them? You can usually tell from context but this type of mixup does happen sometimes.
In English I'm not sure how you could interpret that sentence in a way where you didn't have to do y or z, but it is unclear whether it is just x that takes a long time, or if all three things do.
Yeah it's not a great example, the difference could be on whether you'd have to do y and z before getting there or they'd give you the materials to do them on the spot. Say signing a form they provide vs finding it, printing it and bringing it with you.
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