[Mediawiki-l] Re: Rendering of italics

Sun Apr 24 20:52:46 UTC 2005

On 4/24/05, John Blumel <johnblumel at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Why would anyone choose to use italics, or why would it ever have
> become customary to do so, if some degree of emphasis from the
> surrounding text wasn't the purpose?

Because in the days of the printing press, it was one of the few ways
of distinguishing between two pieces of text. Simple as that. The fact
that it looks to you like emphasis is purely a result of how it came
to be conventionally used.

> One can just as easily declare that things should be marked with em for
> a variety of reasons. After all, there are more degrees of emphasis
> than em and strong define, and many of these don't fall into any of the
> other categories like cite and var. But defining the degree of emphasis
> that justifies/requires em rather than i becomes rather arbitrary

The difference between <i> and <em> is not one of degree, it is one of
purpose. <i> states no specific purpose, only a typographical command;
<em> states no typographical command (although in practice, it implies
one) only a purpose: to emphasise.

How is "citation" a degree of "emphasis"? I guess you're thinking in
terms of how these words would be read aloud, whereas I am thinking in
terms of writing having an existence to an extent independent of
speech. We decorate letters in all sorts of ways, just as we
"decorate" speech with volume, tone, speed, and body language. These
things don't map one to one.

I always think its interesting to consider Chinese in this respect -
because it is not phonetic, written Chinese can almost be considered a
distinct language. It can, I believe, be read by people with widely
differing dialects, because they can look at the same character and
associate the same idea, but put a completly different sound to it.
It's an intriguing psychological question whether we [as English
speakers] associate written language directly with ideas, or only with
the sounds that are then associated with ideas.

I've thought of one last example, where the italics are most
definitely not emphasis:
In a story I read recently, there were two parallel narrative threads
- one was in the first person and the present tense ("I look around,
bewildered."), the other in the more traditional third person, past
tense ("He went upstairs."). To make it easier to tell the threads
apart, the author employed a *typographical* distinction as well - he
put one of the threads in italics. This was not because that thread
was "more important", it was simply "different".

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]