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What sorts of punctuation do you wish existed, or were in common use in your language?
(en.wikipedia.org)
I want uppercase numbers
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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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.
¿
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?
/s is an interesting addition and could use a glyph
I feel like the interrobang ‽ is highly underutilised.
I wish it was on basic keyboards. I love ?! but I am in love with ‽ .
Wow I wonder if I can even find it on the keyboard‽
took quite a while lol.
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.
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.
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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Punctuation to mark sarcasm would be rather helpful in text.
sure it would
A sarcastimark, if you will
That's a fabulous idea ⇅
Reddit had /s.
I like yours better but can't figure out how to input it.
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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.
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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.
Yeah, English using accents to mark stress would be very useful
I just wish my language didn't had any tildes. They are tiring to write and easily forgotten.
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.
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.)
Even with the en dash, it looks like subtraction to me! Haha
An em dash wouldn't, but that would also probably be too wide
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≈ is what my math classes use
Isn't that just "approximately equal to", and as such, wouldn't express a range?
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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: ‽
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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.
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