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What are my punctuation options here:

He said: «When will you come?» or: «When will you come»?

How else can I punctuate that sentence to the standards of the German?

Takkat
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verve
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  • To answer the question whether 《》 are correct guillemets: No, they are left/right double angle brackets, Unicode code points U+12298 and U+12299, respectively. Guillemets are «», U+171 and U+187. How to produce these in Android depends on the (virtual) keyboard. – I’m going to edit this part out of the question. – chirlu Jul 07 '13 at 23:15
  • I've got the Galaxy S3 stock keyboard on 4.1.1. Never heard of Unicode.... – verve Jul 08 '13 at 08:47
  • Geht es um Zeichensetzung oder Zeichensatz? – user unknown Jul 09 '13 at 00:36

1 Answers1

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Because the direct quote is a complete sentence in your example, the question mark is placed inside the quotation marks. So your first version is the right one. However, since you are explicitly asking about the standards for Berlin, in Germany: Outward-pointing guillemets are quite uncommon in Germany (though normal in Switzerland). You would either use them inverted, or use different quotation marks instead:

Er fragte: »Wann kommst du?«
Er fragte: „Wann kommst du?“

About this see also What is the correct way to denote a quotation in German?

If, on the other hand, the quoted part isn’t a complete sentence and the question mark logically belongs to the outer sentence, it is placed after the closing quotation mark:

Ist er an Bord der „Sonnenschein“?

(Here, Sonnenschein is presumed to be the name of a ship.)

Community
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chirlu
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  • Should there a space between the quotation mark and either side of the word? – verve Jul 08 '13 at 08:59
  • @verve There is no French Spacing in German (at least in Germany). The question mark follows the word without space and is followed by any non-punctuation with space. Punctuation follows punctuation without space. So it's „Wann kommst du?“ and „Wann kommst du? Ich will es wissen.“. In modern language, also Er(?) kommt am Mittwoch. and Lasst uns am Mittwoch kommen!? are possible. – Toscho Jul 08 '13 at 09:31
  • There is usually a thin space between the word and the quotation mark. ←what does this "thin space" mean then? It's in the link provided by chirlu – verve Jul 08 '13 at 10:26
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    Es gibt keinen Grund die Sonnenschein in Anführungsstriche zu setzen. Direkte Rede wird mit Anführungsstrichen markiert. Siehe http://blog.tagesanzeiger.ch/deadline/index.php/3008/tote-deine-feinde-die-schwarze-liste/ – user unknown Jul 09 '13 at 00:40
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    @Toscho: Actually, there is French spacing in German, but it isn't what you think it is. French spacing means that the space after a sentence is the same width as the space between words. – chirlu Jul 09 '13 at 00:54
  • @user unknown: Falls Constantin Seibt das meinen sollte (ich lese es nicht heraus), konterkariert er sich selbst, wenn er "Welt" (Zeitungstitel) in Anführungszeichen setzt. – chirlu Jul 09 '13 at 01:01
  • @verve: Note that Toscho wrote about Germany, whereas the other answer mentions thin spaces for Switzerland. – chirlu Jul 09 '13 at 01:03
  • Ah....@user unknown: I don't understand Deutsch. Not fluent. – verve Jul 09 '13 at 07:01
  • @chirlu Then I have confused them. I mean the spacing before question and exclamation marks. If not "French Spacing", what's there proper name? – Toscho Jul 09 '13 at 09:59
  • @Toscho: I'm not aware of any specific term in English or German. You would just describe it, I guess. However, see Plenk for a humorous term for wrongly set spaces before a punctuation mark. – chirlu Jul 09 '13 at 18:54
  • @Toscho as chirlu said French spacing is one way of sentence spacing. As for the spacing around certain punctuation marks: I believe them to be part of French punctuation rules. According to http://french.about.com/library/writing/bl-punctuation.htm those are called “Two-part punctuation marks”. – cgnieder Nov 10 '13 at 15:20