this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
69 points (98.6% liked)

Ask Lemmy

30615 readers
1195 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

¿

When reading out loud it's helpful to know right away that the sentence you're starting is a question.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Not even spaniards use them in nonformal written format my dude.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

I would love a combination of "?" and ",". This would allow me to mark a specific part of a sentence as a question.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

A sentence which embeds a question is a run-on sentence.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

We speak in run-on sentences.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

As someone with ADHD you have no idea how correct you are.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Either the whole thing is a question or you need to break it up.

I'm curious if you can convince me otherwise though!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

“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.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Punctuation to mark sarcasm would be rather helpful in text.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago

sure it would

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That's a fabulous idea ⇅

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Reddit had /s.

I like yours better but can't figure out how to input it.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

A sarcastimark, if you will

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Yeah, no one's come up with one⸮ Even if they did, it probably wouldn't make it into Unicode. 🙄

😁

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

Here, ¡¡¡¡, you can have some of mine. I barely use them these days anymore.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

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.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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!

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

It is circa, but I like to think it's "chemist's approximately"

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

≈ is what my math classes use

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah, English using accents to mark stress would be very useful

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I feel like the interrobang ‽ is highly underutilised.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Wow I wonder if I can even find it on the keyboard‽

took quite a while lol.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

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: ‽

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The noble interrobang will one day shine like the star it is.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Are you kidding‽ I use it all the time! It's even on my phone keyboard.

Did you know that there's even an inverted interrobang? ⸘ I don't know why, but it exists.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

Spanish has opening question and exclamation marks, you would put this inverted interrobang at the beginning of your questclanation as in '⸘Por qué no los dos‽'.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

I want uppercase numbers

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

I wish English had a word like the German "doch," to answer questions like "you're not afraid?"

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

There is one, the interrobang: ‽

But personally I don't like this glyph, it doesn't really work outside of sarcastic questions imo.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

I tend to use "..?" for that purpose. Haven't had any complaints as of yet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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%]"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›