Re: OT: Punctuation

Patrick Dunn wrote:
>
> 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
        I know that Japanese has only a few native punctuation marks (I think
the stop, the comma and the quotes), and borrowed the rest (parentheses,
question and exclamation marks, etc...) but uses them very sparingly
except in technical texts (the question mark is used only with questions
without the question particle _ka_, the exclamation mark used only with
exclamative sentence without a contextual particle like _yo_. They are
hence used only when informal speech is transcribed).

        As for conlang, I have both extremes, with Azak and Notya with only two
punctuation marks (their particular writing systems even allow to write
words without separating them by spaces), and Chasma"o"cho which is as
complicated as English, French and Spanish for that matter, but with a
very different system.

--
        Christophe Grandsire

        Philips Research Laboratories --  Building WB 145
        Prof. Holstlaan 4
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        Phone:  +31-40-27-45006
        E-mail: grandsir@natlab.research.philips.com