Let’s talk about this “” today. Yes, quotation marks. Or cudzysłów, as we call it in Polish. Cudzysłów – literally meaning “somebody else’s words” which is pretty much right on the mark, if you ask me.
In Polish cudzysłów is used a lot less frequently than in English. Why? Because dialogs in Polish books are marked with an m-dash (a long hyphen of sorts), instead of quotation marks. It looks something like this:
– Couldn’t you find something more interesting to write about today?
– Oh, but “quotation marks” are interesting!
– To you maybe…
– Oh, shut up…
I think quotation marks (the Polish kind) are interesting. Why? They differ from the English ones in that they actually look like „that”. Not a huge difference at all, right? And yet you’d be surprised to see how it confuses Polish students of English and foreign students of Polish.
I was working with a Polish teacher once, who was an American, and she stubbornly kept correcting her students’ use of Polish-style quotation marks, apparently unaware of the difference in look and usage.
And just recently I came across an article translated from Polish into English where the Polish style and use of quotation marks was preserved.
Personally, I think I prefer the Polish style. M-dashes are a lot less hassle than quotation marks when typing dialogs. But what baffles me is where the Polish cudzysłów is hiding on my keyboard. I’m a mac user and, frankly, have no clue where to find it. So how did I get it to appear in this post? By copying and pasting it from wikipedia.
Help! Help! 
