¿
When reading out loud it’s helpful to know right away that the sentence you’re starting is a question.
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?
I want uppercase numbers
Not punctuation, but sartalics. It’s italics format but slanted the other direction. Somebody invented it then made it a funny you have to pay for like a jackass instead of working to make it a formating option to there with bold, underline, and italics.
It’s intended to be used for sarcasm, as the name implies.
Barring that, a punctuation mark for sarcasm works be nice.
There is one, the interrobang: ‽
But personally I don’t like this glyph, it doesn’t really work outside of sarcastic questions imo.
I feel like the interrobang ‽ is highly underutilised.
I wish it was on basic keyboards. I love ?! but I am in love with ‽ .
/s is an interesting addition and could use a glyph
I would love a combination of “?” and “,”. This would allow me to mark a specific part of a sentence as a question.
Absolutely yes. I think it’s common (?) practice to use brackets like I just have.
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.
Either the whole thing is a question or you need to break it up.
I’m curious if you can convince me otherwise though!
It’s not about making it a question, is about showing doubt.
“Jake should’ve been there last night (?), but I doesn’t have time to check.”
Sure there are ways to phrase that differently, but it’s the sort of message we can easily communicate with hand gestures and intonation, but fail with written word.
Ah, I see. Like you suggested though, that’s definitely not a question (which is what the other comment said)
“Maybe we can meetup tomorrow? And I’d love to know what you want to do.”
Can be split up into two sentences but sometimes, when spoken, is said as a continuous sentence.
Yeah, that’s either two “sentences” or one statement imo!
The first part doesn’t even need to be a question. A suggestion like that would usually be a statement. If there’s enough rising intonation that it needs a question mark, there’s probably enough of a pause to justify having two sentences.
I wish we had either a single grammatical notation or some kind of special encapsulation to denote sarcasm, because I just hate how “/s” looks. Especially in a hand written paper. It is 100% an internetism and it shows. Most people probably don’t even know why there is a forward slash in it. Lemmings probably do, but most of us are internet gremlins so of course we’d know.
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.
!Yes, please!
Here, ¡¡¡¡, you can have some of mine. I barely use them these days anymore.
Punctuation to mark sarcasm would be rather helpful in text.
That’s a fabulous idea ⇅
Reddit had /s.
I like yours better but can’t figure out how to input it.
Yeah, no one’s come up with one⸮ Even if they did, it probably wouldn’t make it into Unicode. 🙄
😁
English would benefit from using tilde and other inflection marks, especially to help non natives predict syllable stress.
Having words from multiple languages integrated into English means it’s difficult to predict how words will be pronounced.
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.)
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.
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
Isn’t that just “approximately equal to”, and as such, wouldn’t express a range?
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 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%]”
Shit I do that, especially at work (e.g., “I tell you this with an 80% certainty”).
