I'm using biblatex-chicago
as my referencing system as its fairly common in history-related fields and it has all the features I need (notes style rather than author-date, shorthands, etc.).
However, the one inconvenience is the US-style formatting of punctuation and quotation marks, i.e. the placement of punctuation inside quotation marks rather than inside or outside depending on the context, as per European practice and my preference. Obviously as a US style it makes perfect sense that it follows US preferences in the matter and if I'm chasing a chimera by all means tell me so :)
In reading the documentation, I find (v. 1.0rc4 p. 52) that
[i]n common with other American citation styles, the Manual requires that the commas and periods separating units of a reference go inside any quotation marks that happen to be present
but also (same paragraph) that
...
biblatex
contains truly remarkable code that handles this situation in very nearly complete generality, detecting punctuation after the closing quotation mark and moving it in- side when necessary, and also controlling which punctuation marks can be printed after which other punctuation marks, whether quotation marks inter- vene or not. This functionality is now mature, andbiblatex-chicago-notes
relies on this code to place punctuation in the “American style[.”]
The documentation for biblatex
itself (v. 3.7 p. 4) makes reference to using csquotes
and polyglossia
for writing in other than US English.
All told, this suggests one might be able to override the biblatex-chicago
behaviour but I've not been successful in doing so.
Questions:
- Can this be done, and if so, how?
- If not, what would be the next best
biblatex
-flavoured option to handle my needs (I hope I've not left anything significant out).
I'm not bound by the publisher to any given style so can switch if need be.
Here's an MWE which illustrates the issue and my failure to address it adequately.
\documentclass{memoir}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@inbook{Bouzon1995,
Author = {E. Bouzon},
Booksubtitle = {Mélanges von Soden},
Booktitle = {Vom alten Orient zum alten Testament},
Editor = {Manfried Dietrich and Oswald Loretz},
Hyphenation = {german},
Location = {Neukirchen},
Number = {240},
Pages = {11--30},
Publisher = {Neukirchener Verlag},
Series = {Alter Orient und altes Testament},
Shorthand = {\textsc{aoat}~240:2},
Shorthandsort = {aoat 240:2},
Shorttitle = {\emph{ṣimdat-šarrim}},
Title = {Die soziale Bedeutung des \emph{ṣimdat-šarrim}-Aktes nach den Kaufverträgen der Rim--Sin-Zeit},
Volume = {2},
Year = {1995}}
}
\end{filecontents}
\usepackage[style=british,english=british]{csquotes}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setdefaultlanguage[variant=british]{english}
\usepackage[annotation,backend=biber,notes]{biblatex-chicago}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\begin{document}
\mainmatter
Let's have a full citation from Bouzon.\autocite[some ref]{Bouzon1995}
\backmatter
\printbibliography
\end{document}