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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

Guillemets are used in many languages like «this», but 'euro-style' is a bit of a misnomer. They are used all over the world, and in many European languages different pairs are used, such as guillemets the »other« way around, and „this” matching pair.

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See this rather nice map:

https://jakubmarian.com/map-of-quotation-marks-in-european-l...

I like to call «this» the Swiss system, because in Switzerland they use it for four different official languages.

At least in Germany the closing quotation mark is the other way around like „this“

I believe it's „this“, actually (U-201E to start, U-201C to end), but the distinction between all those quotation marks is hellishly difficult, and I bet native speakers get it wrong all the time.

Once upon a time, I wanted to rely on these distinctions in a TTS frontend to distinguish between 5" floppy disk and "Mambo No. 5"

I soon realized that people use quotation marks and dashes in such a random manner that insisting on treating the semantics literally would create more confusion than it would resolve.

Edit: Now that my comment has posted, I realized you used the correct characters, but the font on my browser rendered them in a seemingly incorrect way, so they looked like double primes.

I take great pride in always typing things like 5¼″ and “Mambo № 5” with the exact Unicode scalars that I desire. I love my Compose key. (I have Compose+'+` produce ′ (prime), Compose+"+` produce ″ (double prime), Compose+:+: produce “, Compose+;+; produce ‘, Compose+"+" produce ”, Compose+'+' produce ’, Compose+N+o produce №, and Compose+1+4 produce ¼.)

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