Klarinet Archive - Posting 000298.txt from 2000/12

From: Gavin Rebetzke <GRebetzke@-----.au>
Subj: RE: [kl] The Apostrophe's War
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2000 02:26:26 -0500

Mike Dowler writes:

>Are you so certain? I thought that end punctuation was irrelevant and
>was replaced by the quoting sentence's punctuation. Say it out loud.
>The punctuation is supposed to aid pronunciation. (And while you're
>at it, say that 5 times fast!) This can be further clarified by
>writing:
>
>Who was it who asked the question, "To be or not to be?"
>It was I who asked the question, "To be or not to be."

Mike, at the risk of going well and truly off topic, no, I'm not "so
certain". What you say sounds reasonable to me. It seems to me, however,
that there are two problems with the examples given by you.

The first is that both of the sentences are technically incomplete without a
punctuation mark at their conclusion. Logically, there should be another
punctuation mark after the quotation mark to indicate the end of the
sentence. However, this is almost never done, and I for one am not going to
get excited about this, and indeed, Fowler suggests that convention supports
the omission of one of the punctuation marks. What about:

Was it the Colonel who cried "Advance!"?

It was the Colonel who cried "Advance!"[.]

Logically in both examples there should be a second punctuation mark after
the quotation, but convention only requires it in the first example.

The second problem is that your second example (It was I who asked the
question, "To be or not to be.")misquotes the original passage by insertion
of a punctuation mark other than the one used by Shakespeare. Surely it
would make no difference to the pronunciation by putting the full stop in
this instance on the other side of the quotation mark? Thus I would submit
that the following would be technically more correct:

It was I who asked the question, "To be or not to be".

At least this would not be misquoting the original passage. Having said
that, however, I don't think anyone is really going to get too excited about
which way one approaches this problem. It has been a problem that has
sometimes raised its head when I have been writing, and I cannot truthfully
say I have adopted a consistent course, other than to avoid misquotation.
The reason I could not fault Michael's formula is that it readily explains
the following examples which are given in Fowler:

I said "Am I my bother's keeper?"

Did you say "Am I my brother's keeper"?

And also:

They cried out "We are lost!"

How heartrending was their cry "We are lost"!

Thus in summary, I think what you say is valid in that the way one may want
to have something read may determine the placement of the punctuation,
although I would not disagree with the proposition put forward by Michael
Lawrence as a general rule of thumb.

In any case, this is a totally different topic from that related to the use
and abuse of apostrophes. Surely no one could get worked up about this one?
I wonder what Kevin Fay's editorial committee made of the debate?

Gavin

--
Mike Dowler

At 1:26 PM +1000 12/6/00, Gavin Rebetzke wrote:
>
>I think you are correct, Michael, although strict logic would demand a
>question mark on either side of the quotation mark in the last example like
>so:
>
>Who was it that said "To be or not to be?"?
--
http://www.mp3.com/mikedowler

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