Re: Conpunct

James Campbell wrote:
>
> Could anyone enlighten me about the origins of the question mark and
> exclamation mark? I'm intrigued as to whether their invention is
> documented.
The exlamation mark (!) comes from "lo", with the "l" on top of the "o",
and the question mark (?) comes, IINM, from Latin "quo", think of a
distorted "q" on top of an "o".  Period and comma were adapted from
musical notation.

> <closely related> I sometimes wonder whether any human cultures use a
> different semantic structure (i.e. different from the usual Western
> comma/period/clause/sentence conventions), as I'm trying to make my conlang
> Rahha bend away from that a bit, but I can't stop thinking that way.
> Thoughts?
Well, our punctuation originally indicated *how* it was to be spoken,
i.e., the comma represented a short pause, for instance.  Punctuation
still has a little bit of that usage still, for example ... the ...
three periods ... indicate ... long ... pauses.  Perhaps you could use
punctuation *solely* for that usage, or you could simply use it only for
marking gramatical structures, that is, have a mark indicating new
clause, for instance, and another one for new sentence, perhaps marks
indicating the boundaries of phrases, thus dis-ambiguating structures
like "old men and women" - which can mean "old (men and women)" (that
is, both old men, and old women) or "(old men) and women" (that is,
women and old men).

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