Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 October 26

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October 26

Who did invent gloss quotes?

In Russian single quotes for glosses (e.g. terra ‘earth’) are called "Marr's quotes" (марровские кавычки), thus claiming it was Marr who invented them. Not entirely denying any influence of Marr (usually negative) on Soviet/Russian linguistics, I strongly doubt that he invented that. Who knows any details? P.S. I do not mean the invention of single quote per se but their usage in linguistics.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 17:19, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Nothing firm, but it wouldn't be surprising if Marr was responsible for making this convention standard. The entry for quotation marks [1] from the Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia from 1894 includes similar single quotes in a list of different kinds of quotation marks in use. As far as I can tell Marr wasn't yet well known by that time, so that type of quotation mark was indeed known earlier in the Russian language. But Marr used the Latin alphabet for minority languages where Cyrillic had been standard, and it would make sense if other Western-style conventions came along with the Latin alphabet. This forum post [2] includes a snippet with examples of Marr's system of notation. Since he wrote non-Russian words in the Latin alphabet, he didn't need any additional mark to distinguish them. He seems to have used ordinary angular quotation marks «» to distinguish Russian words that were being mentioned rather than used («черкес» in the snippet). That leaves a need for some way to distinguish Russian words used as glosses for foreign words. The snippet shows that Marr did use (curly) single quotes for this purpose. I don't know whether any earlier linguists used them in a similar way when writing in Russian, but they cannot have used Marr's system as a whole because they would have written foreign words in Cyrillic by default. --Amble (talk) 19:54, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the opinion and the link. I'll try to find out pre-1917 linguistics works and look how they wrote. I also hoped that someone would say about the usage outside of the Russian Empire/USSR.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 22:19, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

For some utterly scattershot examples:

• William Jones ([3] 1807 pub) uses quotation marks only for direct quotations and translations of direct quotations. He uses italics liberally for emphasis; consistently to distinguish foreign words written in the Latin alphabet; consistently to mark English words as lexical items; and occasionally to distinguish gloss words, which are most often not marked in any way.
• An Oxford volume on English etymology (1891 pub) is similar, but even more consistent in not marking the gloss words in any way.
• Karl Brugmann (1904 pub, German) uses italics to mark lexical items written with the Roman alphabet, and always puts the glosses in single quotes, in exactly the Marrovsky style.

The usage in Brugmann has got to be before Marr. If anything, maybe Marr picked it up from Brugmann. What still seems to be new in Marr is the way that foreign lexical items are by default written in a different alphabet from the text itself, so that there's no further need to distinguish those items with quotation marks or italics of their own.

By the way, I should include a disclaimer that I definitely do not have enough grounding in linguistics for my opinions to count for anything! I hope the examples are useful, though. --Amble (talk) 22:55, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! As I said I looked some old works. Here is a good site with a collection of old scientific works. There are a lot of them there, it is impossible to look through all of them (and the site is a little sluggish). But I've just checked some and I noticed the following:

• Before the 1930s the usual practice was to write standard quotes, but such „...“ were much more often used. Some wrote even this way: «word» „gloss“.
• Marr also wrote „gloss“, example [4].
• By the mid of 1920s he already consistently wrote ‘gloss’, though a few followed him.
• By the 1940s already everybody wrote word ‘gloss’ or, if in Cyrillic, слово ‘глосса’.

At least in the USSR Marr might have something to do with the spread of this convention. Outside of the USSR the convention might most likely come from Germans, as German linguistics were dominating in those times. I have read a lot of linguistic books from that era but have no thought of looking closely at the style, now I'll try to pay attention to this.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 00:34, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

An interesting thing has been revealed. In English there are two traditions for quotations: the one with single quotes, and the other with double quotes. Much depends on whether the author uses single or double quotes throughout the text. After looking some English books from the 19th century – the beginning of the 20th century, some different approaches are found:

• The author used font styles or did not use anything:
  • كتب, he wrote;
  • كتب kataba, he wrote; [5], [6]
  • كتب, he wrote;
  • كتب kataba, he wrote. [7]
• The author used double quotes throughout the text: The “past tense” is كتب kataba, “he wrote”. [8], [9][10]
• The author used single quotes throughout the text: The ‘past tense’ is كتب kataba, ‘he wrote’. [11].

Note they all used a comma between the word and the gloss.

It is obvious that the only case when quotations and glosses are differentiated is in the double quoted styles. The Brugmann's example[12] is interesting in that in spite of being written in German it uses the single quoted style throughout the text, thus single quotes for glosses. So examples for single quotes for glosses in the double quoted (or guillemeted) style are needed.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 18:12, 27 October 2015 (UTC)