Ask Lemmy

¿

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

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

Punctuation to mark sarcasm would be rather helpful in text.

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.

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.

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.

I feel like the interrobang ‽ is highly underutilised.

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: ‽

I want uppercase numbers

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.

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.

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

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.

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.