Re: Conpunct

On Fri, 4 Dec 1998, Terrence Donnelly wrote:

> At 02:47 PM 12/4/98 -0500, James Campbell wrote:
>
> >I'd be interested to hear of any other
> >punctuation marks or conpunct stuff from other script systems.
> >
>
> Vogu has only two punctuation marks, a period and comma.  The period
> is a straight line, and signals the end of a sentence.  The comma is
> like a backwards 'c', and it breaks a complex sentence into phrases.
Tokana writing uses three punctuation marks.  Sentence boundaries are
indicated by a mark very like a colon (:), while phrasal boundaries
are indicated by a mark very like a period (.).  To indicate that a
line of text ends in mid-word (hyphenation) a mark is used which looks
a bit like a backwards comma, or like an accent ague written on the
base line.

When writing with the Tokana syllabary, words are often written
together, without any spaces between them (as in Thai or Japanese).
Most writers use spaces to indicate intonational phrase breaks rather
than word breaks.  In order to make texts easier to read, a special
diacritic is used which marks syllables that bear word-level stress.
This helps the reader to break up a row of characters into the component
words.  For example, a sentence like "Ami uthmah halma inai mikale"
("I gave the book to the boy") might be written:

        A-mi-uth-MAH-HAL-ma-i-NAI-mi-KA-le

(Where capitalisation indicates word stress.)  By knowing the Tokana
stress rule, a native speaker would be able to analyse this string as:

        A-mi uth-MAH HAL-ma i-NAI mi-KA-le

Matt.