In Japanese, "、" (読点 tōten) is similar to the English comma; it is used to separately multiple clauses in a sentence. To my understanding, there really aren't grammatical rules for using it like there are in English. In addition, Japanese has no spaces which might lead to some confusion on the how punctuation and spaces are laid out in English. I think the most notable thing from Japanese -> English speakers is the lack of article usage (words like a, an, the) because they simply don't exist in Japanese. But I digress, the main take away is that other languages may not have as strict rules on some of the grammatical structures that are similar to those we use in English.

Not to mention the fact that in Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian languages, most punctuation is full-width, with spacing built into the character itself. Compare the English characters (?!.,:) with the Chinese characters （？！。，：）, and you can see how a lot of Asian language learners might just forget to hit the space bar.

> In this case, Spanish

The OP is Turkish. Ankara is the capital of Turkey. His name is Turkish. Punctuation is the same as in English.

Sorry, I saw the "Barcelona,Spain" on his about page and incorrectly assumed that is where he was originally from.

Barcelona, Spain would have implied Catalan, not Spanish.

I know that's what the Catalan government says, but is it actually the case? Wikipedia says

"As an official language, Spanish is understood almost universally in Barcelona. In addition, 95% of the population understand Catalonia's own native Catalan language, while 74.6% can speak it, 75% can read it, and 47.1% can write it"

A writing literacy of less than 50% sounds pretty poor.

As far as I know, punctuation association rules are the same in all indo-european languages. Most of them bind to the left and have a space to the right. Emdash, and ... have two spaces, and endash and apostrophe have no spaces.

But people struggle with this. I distinctly remembering practicing this in class when prepping for matura (Slovenian version of SATs) so I guess it isn't inherently obvious to everyone.

> Emdash, and ... have two spaces, and endash and apostrophe have no spaces.

In English, Em-dashes have a couple of different uses, but in the most common use they are usually set closed (no spaces on either end), though some styles set them with a space on either end. En-dashes have one use (similar to that of em-dashes, which is used varies by house style) where they are usually set open, and a number where they are usually set closed.

Given that the rules for these marks aren't particularly consistent, or even fixed, in English, I think its safe to say they aren't consistent for the same piece of punctuation across all uses in all Indo-European languages.

Your description leads me to believe I confused emdashes and endashes again. Happens every time.

> En-dashes have one use

Actually, the en dash has more than one use: http://cddc.uchicago.edu/qanda/data/faq/topics/HyphensEnDash...

FWIW, Turkish is not an Indo-European language. It's an Altaic language [1] like Mongolian, Japanese, Korean, etc. Though, it looks like one because Ataturk (founder of Turkey) converted the Turkish alphabet from Arabic script to Latin script when the new republic was found.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages

Unfortunately I think it's not so simple

    ";" is surrounded by space left and right
    ":" has no space on the left in English, but it has one in French

Nope, according to wikipedia on ";"

> Modern style guides recommend no space before them and one space after.

And that's really interesting about French. Personally I think a colon surrounded by spaces looks funny, but then again, I've never learned a language where that wasn't the correct way.

edit: my French girlfriend says French puts spaces on both sides of all punctuation except commas and periods. Like this !

Weirdos O.o

The spaces-before-questionmarks-and-exclamation-marks is one of the "tells" I use to figure out a writer is French.

More often than not it's a dead giveaway...

Funny story, I'm a native English speaker but I've been studying French for the past few years. I now constantly and subconsciously add spaces before punctuation like French grammar.

Sounds like a half-way decent spam detection rule !

Couldn't believe it myself, so I opened a French newspaper.

http://www.lemonde.fr/football/article/2014/09/17/ligue-des-...

Looks like it's indeed like she told you.

To be precise, the space before punctuation is of course non-breaking, and it is a narrow no-break space (i.e., thinner than a usual space) in careful typography (e.g., LaTeX with "\usepackage[francais]{babel}" does it).

(Another fun pedantic remark: French typography rules require that you apply the rules of a foreign language whenever you quote text in that language, so that the English rules should be respected for English quotations within a French text.)

And I agree with akx -- being French, I've seen my share of French people writing in English with the French rules, and I always thought that it could be used as an indicator by a careful reader.

(As an example, there used to be an ads campaign in the Parisian subway some years ago which advertised "I speak Wall Street English !" or something or the kind. As this was for an English class, I always found it funny that they couldn't get their English typography right.)

Assuming OP's native language is Turkish, that uses the same punctuation as English.

Aside from, Turkish do not use commas before conjunctions.

As an additional anec-datapoint here, I've noticed it's a relatively common habit amongst native english speakers who have some degree of dyslexia. I've asked about it once or twice, and the most consistent answer is something like 'I don't even notice I'm doing it; when I finish a word I insert a space, then think about the punctuation and add it on...'

This is not to suggest that this structure indicates dyslexia of course, the rest of this thread has plenty of other good reasons for non-native english speakers and otherwise.

poor grammar instruction in school. A space is normally after a period even in russian.

Ah, I thought it was something more than poor instruction. I participate in some foreign language pen-pal services and I see this a lot, more often than any other English grammar mistake.

> In this case, Spanish

In Spanish you put a space after periods and commas, so that's not it.

My guess would be that he is a coder and has a habit of spacing either side of a comma for his own readability preference. A dot between words would be like method calls in many languages.

Another Turkish here.

The spacing around punctuation in Turkish in the same as English. It's just that OP failed to spellcheck his writing.