The way of marking quotations in Hungarian printed documents

• Authors: Csontos N.
• Languages of publication: HU

Abstracts

EN

From the mid-seventeenth century up to the appearance of the first quotation marks, quotations were marked in two ways: (1) by a combination of a punctuation mark that from the early eighteenth century onwards was a colon and of a capital letter; and (2) along with the above, by italicisation. The primary function of italicisation was enhancement and delimitation from the rest of the text. A fact that supports that claim is that the same font was used in that period for marking new information, titles, foreign words, anticipatory words, dialogues, and stories inserted in the text, too. It can be concluded from an investigation of various texts that italicisation was used to represent all text portions that could be seen as embedded utterances/chains of utterances/parts of utterances and that, due to their being embedded, had an intertextual or paratextual relationship with the main text. The first quotation marks appeared at the end of the eighteenth century. Their function was to mark direct quotations and turns within dialogues. The form and function of quotation marks are identical to those of a reference mark found in Káldi's translation of the Bible. Quotation marks probably got into Hungarian due to some foreign influence. In the spread of their use, with respect to printed documents, printing houses must also have had a large share.

Keywords

EN

PUNCTUATION; QUOTATION MARKS

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Committee on Hungarian Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Magyar Nyelvor (Hungarian Language Guardian)
• Year: 2004
• Volume: 128
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 242-256
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Csontos N.

• N. Csontos, no address given, contact the journal editor

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

06HUAAAA01042387