Inverted Punctuation

[SPX]

I've noticed that a lot of younger Spanish speakers don't use double punctuation in casual written conversation like when chatting online or posting somewhere like Facebook.

Is this common? It seems that among this crowd whenever you DO use double-punctuation it comes off as excessively formal. . .

[Luna Azul]

Originally Posted by SPX

I've noticed that a lot of younger Spanish speakers don't use double punctuation in casual written conversation like when chatting online or posting somewhere like Facebook.

Is this common? It seems that among this crowd whenever you DO use double-punctuation it comes off as excessively formal. . .

A lot of younger Spanish speakers can't even write good Spanish..

[SPX]

I'm just wondering if it's a general trend, and not just among younger people, to forego double punctuation when writing casually.

[Cuholvke]

You will be lucky if you find more than three spanish speakers per site who writes entire words, accents, commas and points. xD

[Rusty]

And that correctly use upper or lowercase letters.

points = full stops (BrE); periods (AmE)

[laepelba]

Not that I defend things that have been written incorrectly, but it has been explained to me that (at least in email) you can't always guarantee that tildes and other non-English-based punctuation can transfer as written, but sometimes come through as a jumble of alt-characters. I have found that happens to me when I attempt to be (ahem) and use the tildes, etc. anyway.

[wrholt]

Originally Posted by laepelba

Not that I defend things that have been written incorrectly, but it has been explained to me that (at least in email) you can't always guarantee that tildes and other non-English-based punctuation can transfer as written, but sometimes come through as a jumble of alt-characters. I have found that happens to me when I attempt to be (ahem) and use the tildes, etc. anyway.

Yes, that still happens sometimes.

[put on technical-expert hat]

This problem is a historical artefact of the development of communication systems, including teletype communications. Historically there have been many different schemes for representing text data electronically. Most schemes are capable of representing text in only one or a small number of languages. And for many types of documents there is NO standard means to record either the encoding scheme that was used or to detect what the scheme was. So, if your document editing/display program expects text in one encoding system and it tries to display text from a different encoding system, the mismatched characters show up as garbled text.

The good news is that the situation is changing with the increasing popularity of Unicode, an encoding scheme that can accommodate texts written in any combination of most existing scripts. The bad news is that not all older documents or legacy software systems have been converted to use Unicode.

[/put on technical-expert hat]

[pjt33]

Originally Posted by laepelba

Not that I defend things that have been written incorrectly, but it has been explained to me that (at least in email) you can't always guarantee that tildes and other non-English-based punctuation can transfer as written, but sometimes come through as a jumble of alt-characters. I have found that happens to me when I attempt to be (ahem) and use the tildes, etc. anyway.

10 years ago I learnt to write ~ for ñ in e-mails. Nowadays I just use ñ and rarely have problems.

[AngelicaDeAlquezar]

@SPX: Just for the sake of pedantic attention to details: they are not "inverted punctuation", but "opening question/exclamation marks".

And I agree that most people writing in Spanish are too lazy and careless for writing with good spelling and acceptable (won't pretend good) grammar.

[Rusty]

SPX named the thread "Double punctuation." When I read that he was talking about dropping the inverted mark (the opening mark), I renamed the thread to "Inverted punctuation." In the U.S., we call the Spanish opening marks inverted or upside-down marks.