Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
What we need to do world wide is get rid of single quotes for speech and make them double quotes and that includes any other country that uses different punctuation. The UK (IMHO) is using obsolete single quotes for a lot of books.
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It's to save ink
Not all UK books use single quotes for speech. You do need single quotes for nested quotes.
Sadly the ’ symbol is closing quote, possessive indication and missing letter(s) indication. Some missing letter indications can be at the start of a word and ‘smart quotes’ messes that. Also Irish and Scottish names like O'Neill, which is really for ‘ui’, and it's often incorrectly used for feet or hours, a single prime or at worst italic straight quote should be used.
It's totally lazy having ebooks and even paper books using " and ' for quotes. Those generally only belong in programming or typewriters, though the ' can be used in transliteration of words to English, the ’ is sometimes incorrectly used for that.
We use double quotes for outer level of speech but single quotes if it's a meta occurrence like ‘A’ is the first letter of the Roman-Latin alphabet.
Edit:
I don't see why French and about 18 other countries should drop «and», nor others drop „and“, also used by many countries. Nested quotes vary by country too. Welsh and Scottish allegedly use single quote outer, I suspect it varies. Irish is like UK English, it can use either system, though the double quote outer is common. Wikipedia is overly dogmatic and inaccurate on the Quotation Mark, but the English Wikipedia is highly USA centric.