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In-Reply-To:  Your message of "Mon, 17 Feb 1997 10:52:19 +0100." 
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Date:         Mon, 17 Feb 1997 11:10:16 +0000
From: Robin Fairbairns <Robin.Fairbairns@CL.CAM.AC.UK>
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To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
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Subject:      Re: International documents
Status: R

>   The question of what to use as first and second order quotation marks
> seems to be language related:
>   In US English (and Swedish), quotes are nested as
>     ``And then he said `foo bar', ... ''
> whereas in UK English, it is
>     `And then he said ``how bad'', ... '
> I think.

I'm not aware of any fixed rule about this: if there is one, it's
certainly not enforced.

> * In US English, the number 1e9 is typeset as "one billion", whereas in UK
> English, it is typeset as "one milliard". (After the French revolution, the
> metric system, and the system with "milliard" was invented, and the
> British, as the Swedes, started using that; later the French switched back
> to the original system, the used in the US.)

I boggle.  I've never heard *anyone* use milliard in 50 years of
listening to spoken English (as opposed to USAn, that is ;-).  I've
seldom heard it in spoken French, for that matter, but I did at least
know of its existence as a French word...

>   In principle, one could think of special commands for cardinal numbers;
> one might the use the source code, to see which number was intended. :-)

Eh?

Robin Fairbairns