Consistent punctuation oddities

[Damien Hall]

> 1. Space before periods and commas rather than after. "Money ,that
> devil substance ,is like heaven to some people .They have no idea what
> hell is like ."

Interestingly, this looks like a partial counterpart to French normative
punctuation.  That is, French normative punctuation (at least that of France)
inserts a space before (and after) semi-colons, colons, exclamation-marks and
question-marks, but not before commas, full-stops or quotation-marks.  I don't
know that the phenomenon of spaces before full-stops and commas can be
straightforwardly related to the French practice, but thought it was worth
adding to the discussion.

Damien Hall
University of Pennsylvania

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