• In French we have a similar problem. Currently the most popular form is “citoyen.ne.s” or “citoyen.nes” (besides the good old “citoyens” or “citoyennes et citoyens”), which sometimes gets rendered as a website by some text displayers (e.g. les habitant.es). It’s technically supposed to be a middle dot (citoyen·ne·s) but nobody has that on their keyboard (I literally had to copy-paste it from wikipedia) so people use the point instead. We used to use parentheses like “citoyen(ne)s” but these have vastly be replaced by the dots.

    • @sonnenzeit@feddit.de
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      fedilink
      31 year ago

      Interesting. In German typography we used to use lower quotation marks at the beginning of a quote and lower quotation marks at the end of a quote, both in handwriting and print:

      „Amazing“

      But the lower version isn’t found on the default QWERTZ keyboard layout so in personal digital communication (instant messages, emails, etc) especially you find double upper ones a lot:

      “Amazing” or ‘Amazing’

      The formal spelling rules haven’t been updated and you may still find the lower-upper vision in professional publications where the software adjusts the quotation marks according to a global setting. But most anything that is typed directly by a user will use the lazy lower-lower version.

      • We actually have the same issue with our « quotes » and accentuated capital letters in French, so « l’État » sometimes becomes “l’Etat”.