I would love a combination of “?” and “,”. This would allow me to mark a specific part of a sentence as a question.
A sentence which embeds a question is a run-on sentence.
We speak in run-on sentences.
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 @xmunk@sh.itjust.works’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.
Either the whole thing is a question or you need to break it up.
I’m curious if you can convince me otherwise though!
“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.
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)
Absolutely yes. I think it’s common (?) practice to use brackets like I just have.
Spanish has ¿ and ?, not sure if that’s what you mean
¿
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.
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.
I often preface questions and exclamations with a couple question marks/exclamation points to help clarify! Very useful.
I feel like the interrobang ‽ is highly underutilised.
Wow I wonder if I can even find it on the keyboard‽
took quite a while lol.
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.)
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!
ISO 8601 or GTFO
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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Isn’t that just “approximately equal to”, and as such, wouldn’t express a range?
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.
I want uppercase numbers
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: ‽
The noble interrobang will one day shine like the star it is.
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.
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.
/s is an interesting addition and could use a glyph
