Re: OT: Punctuation

On Sun, 5 Dec 1999 14:56:40 -0600 Patrick Dunn <tb0pwd1@...>
writes:
> It's interesting that our conlangs have so few marks of punctuation
> as a
> general rule.  Most people seem to get by with three or four marks
> or
> fewer.  Yet English and Spanish (two languages with which I'm
> familiar)
> have somewhere around twelve.  Hebrew has -- what?  All I can
> remember is
> the complete stop, but I know there's more than that.  Why such a
> dearth
> of punctuation among conlangs, I wonder.  Or is English/Spanish/etc.
> atypical?
>
> --Pat
.


Well, Rokbeigalmki has a whole lot of punctuation marks.  I'll try to
remember them all:

Period - a small circle in the middle of the line.  full stop.
Comma (short pause) - a tilde in the middle of the line.
Dash (long pause) - a dash in the middle of the line.
Hyphen (grammatical attacher) - a short dash replacing the space between
the words.
Apostraphe (grammatical attacher) - a short dash (shorter than hyphen) by
the tops of the letters, or a halflength vertical line hanging from the
top of the line.
Abbreviators - doubled apostraphe, looking either like '' or elevated =
depending on the apostraphe style.
Quotes - like russian / hebrew quotes, except the beginning quote marks
are at the top of the line: ''like this,,.
Parentheses - can be either curved like parentheses or angular like
brackets.
Question Mark - a period circle with a line extending from the right side
and curving up.
Exclamation Mark - a period circle with lines extending straight from
left and right sides.
Exclamatory Question - exclamation mark whose right line curves upwards.
Slash / Separator - vertical line extending above and below the letters.

There are also three above-letter diacritics:

Tilde - lengthens vowels. {a} = /a/, {a~} = /a::/.
Accent (rising) - marks accented syllable of names, also used for words
differentiation only by accentuation, and for verbless subject-tense
complexes, and for construct compounds that have been written
disconnected, and for construct compounds with ambiguous affixes..
CIrcumflex ("smitchik") - marks the first letter of construct compounds.

Since you mentioned Hebrew, Modern Hebrew has all the same punctuation
marks as English, as far as i can tell, although sometimes it uses dashes
for quotations instead of quote marks, uses a special Abbreviator mark
(actually there are two different ones) instead of periods for
abbreviations, and uses russian style quote marks.  Biblical Hebrew has
no punctuation.  Old and old-style prayerbooks use ":" for full stop and
"." for pause.  Biblical cantillation marks show punctuation, some of
them connecting words and others separating them.  This is where the ":"
fullstop mark comes from, used for verse-breaks.  "Etnakhta" (upside down
U with vertical line rising from the top) marks mid-verse breaks.


-Stephen (Steg)
 "Eze-guvdhab wa'hrikh-a tze, / "zhoutzii wa'esh," i eze-mwe."

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