Punctuation reader. Quotation marks are particularly variable across European languages. For example, in French and Russian, quotes would appear as: (in French, each "double punctuation", as the guillemet, requires a non-breaking space; in Russian it does not). In French of France, the signs : ; ? and ! are always preceded by a thin unbreakable space. In Canada, this is only the case for :. In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point , known as the (). In Georgian, three dots, , were
Slovene punctuation to illustrate that a word is not used as it normally is, or simply to emphasise it. Usually, in printed texts, such words are printed either "italic" or bold as opposed to using excessive quotes. Inverted commas are also used to mark proper nouns that could be mistaken for common nouns, such as at sentence beginnings. A dash (–) is a one or two part non-leaning punctuation mark (except where noted). Semantically, there is no difference between the longer and the shorter dash, – and –, although common usage prefers the shorter one in all cases except upon connection of