What do you call these things « », and do you use them at all?
There are several names for « », including guillemets, angle quotes, duckfoot quotes, chevrons and double angle quotation marks.
The word guillemet [ˈɡɪləmɛt / ˈɡiːmeɪ / ˌɡiː(j)əˈmeɪ] comes from French, and is a diminutive form of the French name Guillaume (William). They are named after Guillaume Le Bé (1525 – 1598), a French printer and typecutter, although he probably didn’t invent them. They first appeared in 1527 in a book printed by Josse Bade (1462 – 1535), a Flemish printer [source], and are used as quotation marks in Albanian, Breton, Catalan, Estonian, French, Galician, Greek, Italian, Kurdish and various other languages [source].
The word chevron comes from Middle English cheveroun (a device in the shape of an inverted V), from Old French chevron (rafter), from Vulgar Latin *capriō (goat), caper (goat) [source]. Apparently, goat’s horns look like the rafters of a shallow roof, and the word chevron in French can refer to sloping pieces of wood used in roofing [source].
I was inspired to write this post after seeing chevrons on the road while driving through Storm Darragh, which is currently lashing the UK with high winds and heavy rain. Fortunately, the journey went safely despite the weather.
There may be fewer Omniglot up-dates and blog posts over the next few weeks due to Christmas preparations, and sorting things out after my mum sadly died at the age of 84 last weekend.
Sorry to hear about the passing of your mom, Simon.
This discussion of chevrons is interesting. In the US, basically nobody uses the word chevron, except to refer to the Chevron Oil Company. Other than that context, you never hear the word chevron here in everyday speech.
I hope you and yours all the strength you need after the passing of your mother.
The word chevron is also used in the Stargate science fiction franchise to refer to V-shaped locking mechanisms of the titular stargates.
In Finnish, the angle quotes are sometimes used in non-fiction books in place of comma-shaped quotation marks. We normally use ” as both the starting and ending quote, unlike English which inverts the starting character. Similarly, when using angle quotes, both of them are of the form ».
Wikipedia has an awesome article that tells you everything you need to know (and much, much more) about quotation marks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark
I am sorry to hear you lost your mother, wishing you strength ahead.
I ran across the word guillemets for the first time late this afternoon.
Tori