On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 7:49 PM, Roger Mills <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Even so, it's a little hard to tell when she stops speaking.......

French generally uses a dash or guillemets to mark quoted speech, but
for some reason the dialogue tags usually aren't offset or de-quoted
in any particular way. In practice, I haven't found that this causes
confusion very often, and I suspect native French speakers have even
less trouble with it. I like Gary's way of de-quoting non-dialogue,
but I think it needs to be combined with some way to show where quoted
speech begins, and probably where a different speaker starts talking
-- maybe an em dash.

On a related note, I think during one of the LoCoWriMo threads of
recent years we talked about the syntax of quoted speech -- whether
the language allows dialogue tags to be embedded in the middle of a
quote, or requires them to be preposed or postposed. I decided that
gjâ-zym-byn doesn't allow embedded dialogue tags; it can have them
preposed or postposed, but the preposed and postposed have slightly
different syntax.

twâ-ƥ-zô Φǒ: {?mrân-zô srem Ќ-ť.}
She said, "Shall we eat?"

or:

{?mrân-zô srem Ќ-ť.} ce ĉul-i twâ-ƥ-zô.
 "Shall we eat?" (She said this.)

Actually, one can embed a dialogue tag in the middle of a discourse --
begin as in the second example above, and then continue with quoted
speech after the dialogue tag. But it doesn't allow inserting a
dialogue tag into the middle of a quoted sentence, as in English:

"Shall we eat here," she asked, "or go find some restaurant with a
higher score from the health department?"

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
http://www.jimhenrymedicaltrust.org