How do you render quotes, titles, proper names etc.?

[awer]

i was wondering how specific my language can/should be.

ever since i came across the need to render a movie title within a sentence, i knew i couldn't leave it unmarked.

i don't know the name for those items but they tend to be left outside normal human language use. paradoxically, written language, which is meant to reflect its spoken counterpart, is more accurate in rendering those items by using quotation marks, italics, capital letters etc. if a speaker doesn't explicitate them by intonation, we're only left with the context to figure them out.

some english common nouns are used as proper nouns/names but you can tell when it is the case since you normally don't use the articles the,a and an with names. japanese uses to to mark quotations. what are you guy's ways to render the sentence: "the phrase 'the die is cast' comes from latin" unambiguously in speech? nothing seems to indicate the apposition or the length of the quoted phrase, you just have to figure it out/make sense of it by means of intelligence. also, in the last sentence you know i didn't mean "the apposition of the quoted phrase or the length of the quoted phrase", you had to figure out what i meant because 'or' funcions on many levels in english (word, phrase, sentence level). all this is the reason machine translation sucks so bad.

deictic words may be ambiguous; compounds like blackbird are only indicated by intonation- how do the chinese figure out word and phrase boundaries?

it makes you realise how inefficient human languages seem to be. have you tried to fix any of that in your conlangs? (or sentences of this type: "List_of_linguistic_example_sentences")

hope you know what i mean.

[Zaarin]

deictic words may be ambiguous; compounds like blackbird are only indicated by intonation- how do the chinese figure out word and phrase boundaries?

Actually, the difference between "blackbird" and "black bird" is that "blackbird" is a single word--which isn't simply a matter of how it's written (as Zompist points out in the ALCK).

As for indicating proper nouns in writing, there are plenty of things one can do with it. My main conlang at the moment is written in Syriac, so it doesn't distinguish proper nouns in writing. Another conlang I'm working on I haven't devised the script for, but I plan to mark proper names Egyptian-style with a cartouche.

In speech, proper nouns and compounds both form lexical categories. Marianne Mithun's article on naming in Mohawk (towards the bottom, published 1984) may be of interest to you.

[Pabappa]

All I know is that I want asterisks for emphasis. Even though this is an a priori language with no contact from Earth languages, I think the asterisk could arise on its own with a similar meaning to what is used here. (But it is full height, unlike the English one.) Oddly this was one of the first things I worked on with conlangs, all the way back in 1992 when I was basically just using mutated English, but I have hardly come up with any new thoughts since then.

By asterisks I mean *like this*, with the asterisks on both sides of the phrase.