What's going on with the comma placement ,here?

August 29, 2013 2:00 AM

I'm on a dating site and I've noticed that in the profiles and messages of some non-native English speakers there's a pattern of irregular spacing around commas. I don't believe that it is a random typographical error, as I have seen it repeatedly by different writers. Here's an example: "I like to go to the party ,park,movies ,I like to go hike ,swimming ,travel " The above example is from a native Arabic speaker. Is this related to the grammatical construction of a particular language, differences in keyboards, or something else?
posted by aspen1984 to Writing & Language (13 answers total)

Are you seeing the comma spacing only from native speakers of right-to-left languages?

I sort of doubt that it's human error as punctuation placement differences are easy to learn and get right but it could be that there's some weirdness in how the switching between RTL and LTR encodings is happening on their machine or in the database of the dating site. When I type Arabic queries into search sites it sometimes spaces things a little oddly.
posted by atrazine at 2:09 AM on August 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

If you're just seeing it from speakers of languages that are written right to left, then I think there's a good chance it has to do with their software/browser settings. I have a really tough time formatting Hebrew properly, and highlighting/copying/pasting it, because everything I use is set up for English.
posted by cairdeas at 2:09 AM on August 29, 2013 [2 favorites]

It's very likely it's something to do with their keyboard. My computer at work is set up for Arabic and when I switch to English, I notice that sometimes the formatting is off a little bit in some instances - Firefox is one thing I can think of that gives me trouble.

Also, my partner is a native Arabic speaker and although he speaks/reads/writes perfect English, his punctuation placement is something I've noted. I've never seen the comma placement you mentioned, but he always puts a space before an exclamation mark. For example, he'll write, "That is a pretty incredible song !"
posted by gursky at 2:18 AM on August 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

I tutored a non-native english speaker years ago for the GMAT essay. In a 5 paragraph essay, he used 0 correct punctuation. I believe he was a native Arabic speaker. Essentially he wasn't used to ending sentences with periods.
posted by Farce_First at 3:48 AM on August 29, 2013

Fake accounts maybe? Created by a not so well programmed bot to add a randomized (and not so well configured) profile.
posted by w.fugawe at 6:12 AM on August 29, 2013

Best answer: When I taught nonnative English speakers whose first language was Chinese or Arabic, they frequently had trouble knowing/remembering where to put spaces in relation to punctuation. It looked a lot like your examples. I think (but am not totally sure) other Asian students (Vietnamese and Korean maybe?) had this issue too.

I saw them do it in our school computer lab, which has English keyboards, so for my students it wasn't a keyboard thing.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 9:32 AM on August 29, 2013

Many of my ESL students omit spaces after the punctuation but this is the first time I've ever seen the space going on the wrong side. Guessing it's related to LTR-RTL switching as conjectured upthread.
posted by Rash at 9:33 AM on August 29, 2013

Also, my partner is a native Arabic speaker and although he speaks/reads/writes perfect English, his punctuation placement is something I've noted. I've never seen the comma placement you mentioned, but he always puts a space before an exclamation mark. For example, he'll write, "That is a pretty incredible song !"

This may be the result of contact with written French--is he from an Arabic-speaking country which has a French-speaking population, such as Algeria or Lebanon? In French, it's correct to place a nonbreaking space before colons, semicolons, question marks and exclamation points. If he was introduced to the Latin alphabet via French, he may have picked up a few of its quirks.
posted by pullayup at 11:00 AM on August 29, 2013

pullayup: no, he is from Saudi (and learned English at a British-curriculum school) - but that's interesting to know as he does have some French-and-English speaking friends, so maybe that's where he picked it up as he learned English.
posted by gursky at 11:23 AM on August 29, 2013

I see that on Craigslist sometimes coming from people who I presumed were native speakers, and assumed it had something to do with the person's comfort with their typing device. But if you are seeing something that never changes (i.e. it never becomes "I like dogs,fish,and cats" or any other variant) then maybe we're talking about two different phenomena?
posted by feets at 12:45 PM on August 29, 2013

The space before the comma was a writing trait of an Indian co-worker. Either she was taught that way or she misunderstood and was never corrected. I wonder if it is related to folks who grew up without a romance alphabet, as I'm not sure that I've seen a comma delineated list used in Hindi, Japanese, or Chinese.
posted by jander03 at 2:15 PM on August 29, 2013

I always suspect this is from tap typing on tablet screens.
posted by humboldt32 at 1:23 AM on August 30, 2013

One of my (Chinese) colleagues writes this way. I've not summoned up the courage to ask them about this yet, but I suspect it's to do with some bogus 'always put a space after a word' rule that got hammered into them at school. (The space thing needs reinforcing because Chinese sentences don't have spaces.)
posted by fix at 11:22 AM on August 30, 2013