#interpunction

I'm reading a book at the moment, bla bla context bla bla. This is a very well known writer, his work is translated to English and I found a sentence that looks so outrageous and it has been on my mind the entire day (not kidding, I cannot let it go) ready? Here it comes:

"I didn't write these essays, then, at request of a publisher, but, rather on my own initiate, something I wrote for my own sake."

I didn't know this was allowed... The number of commas... That's insane to me. I wonder how this sentence came to be. Like I am legit interested. Is it a translation thing? Is it a transcription from speech? Is it...????

Okay thank you for letting me rant about language once again

Gnaborretni and Interrobang

Hi,

these are different styles of quotation marks. «» are mostly used in Switzerland and Liechtenstein„“ are mostly used in Germany and Austria

I have not yet found a source telling us why the marks in German are “99 down – 66 up”, but probably it has to do with the overall history of the quote marks that originally were in the middle of the writing line, like the dash - .In different languages, different conventions became established, so that we have this large variation across languages nowadays. (In Greek, for example, the sequence is inverted to German, the opening marks are at the top, the closing marks are at the bottom.)