Wednesday, July 26, 2023

A CMOS quiz

From The Chicago Manual of Style, a new quiz: Other Languages.

[I scored a 90. Someday I’m gonna get 100.]

comments: 8

ChasM said...

Not sure about that Hawai'i answer. The apostrophe is called an 'okina and it's a thing. Everything I've read says it's an "official consonant", so I think they're wrong. Does that get you to 100%?

Michael Leddy said...

That’s the one I got wrong. But if the replacement is a single left quotation mark, I’m wrong.

Fresca said...

I got 100, but I half-guessed on a couple (capitalized languages as adjectives, and the German quote marks). Still, I’m claiming it😊!

Dan said...

That's the one I got wrong, but for a different reason. In Arabic, you use an apostrophe to represent the glottal stop; I didn't know that in Hawai'ian the glottal stop is represented by a different symbol. This led me to the Univ. of Hawai'i web page on rendering the Hawai'ian language online: https://www.hawaii.edu/site/info/diacritics.php -- which points out other details....

ChasM said...

Since in my experience island people refer to it as "The Big Island", I thought perhaps a dropped apostrophe would be a way to distinguish the island from the state, but no, they spell it Hawai'i too. I think you got 100.

Michael Leddy said...

Fresca, I won’t tell the CMOS that you guessed if you don’t.

Dan, that’s a very interesting page. Thanks for the link.

ChasM, I appreciate your rescoring my quiz. But the mark they’re looking for a single left quotation mark. So my apostrophe loses.

Daughter Number Three said...

Ah, 80% for me... the dratted Hawaii plus I haven't dealt with German quote marks enough.

Michael Leddy said...

That Hawaii question — no 100s for us.