Re: Latin mxedruli, or do we really need capital and small letters?

Javier wrote:

<<And for that reason we use the starting interrogative (¿)
and exclamative (¡) points in Spanish, ;-).>>

And that, of course, is where I got the idea, and I consider the system to be 
infinitely superior to English's.

Still Javier:

<<OTOH, is your system of punctuation marks more complete/accurate
than that of Roman script, which hardly differentiates between
several semantically relevant intonations?>>

No, I didn't, and I'll tell you why.   Writing fiction (especially dialogue), 
I discovered how necessary it is to some-
how indicate what the intonation of the sentence is.   To do this, English 
has at its disposal commas, periods,
question marks, exclamation points, dashes, ellipses and italics.   That's 
it.   (Well, there's also an argument that
there are certain phonological strings that serve to mark intonation--at 
least, that's what I'm arguing in my
semantics squib.)   In order to get at specific intonational patterns, one 
has to come up with a combination of
these, if one won't suffice.   Often, though, even the combinations aren't 
good enough.   This is when I became
convinced of the necessity of creating new punctuation marks.   And I really 
believe that a good orthography
should have extra punctuation to cover intonation.   After all, anyone who's 
written/read an e-mail, or has
sent/received an instant message has had to deal with the fact that sometimes 
intonation doesn't carry, and
somebody thinks you're mad at them when you're joking.   Things like j/k and 
emoticons have arisen to fill the
void, but they should not have been necessary in the first place.

However, so far, I have not seen a natural language orthography whose 
punctuation actually bears the entire
intonational load of the language.   Some are better than others, but even 
the best ones don't come close.   Since
I wanted Zhyler's orthography to be a realistic orthography, I created what I 
thought was a realistic set of
punctuation marks, and not a full range like I think is necessary and/or 
preferable.

Javier also wrote:

<<Has anybody invented additional punctuation marks for the
Roman script - say, like that (not very successful) symbol
that fuses "?" and "!"?>>

I invented two.   This was specifically for writing.   The elipses, in 
dialogue, is often used when someone trails off.
But I identified (at least) three different types of trail-offs.   There's 
the type of trail-off where you really trail off,
like, "The other day I was talking to...", and then maybe the speaker gets 
distracted, and kind of stops speaking.
They're not being cut off--that would warrant a dash--they just kind of lose 
their train of thought.   That's the
kind I think the ellipses handle well.   However, I identified two more which 
I at least think are important.
There's the trail-off question.   This is common when a speaker doesn't 
actually want to ask a question, and
hopes a few words will be enough to clue the listener in.   So, imagine a 
merchant (doesn't matter what kind)
has closed a deal with a customer, but for some reason doubts that the 
customer has enough money to actually
buy whatever it is they agreed on.   The merchant might say, "And how would 
you be...?"--a shortening of,
"And how would you be paying for all this?"   That's a second.   A third is 
what I called the smile trail-off.   So
imagine a situation where a person is describing a week-long getaway to some 
wonderful resort, and the
listener responds with, "Gee, that would be wonderful...", and they seem to 
be continuing their thought in their
head; daydreaming.

All right, those are the three.   Like I said, ellipses can handle the first 
all right.   For the second, though, I never
liked the way ...? looked.   For the third, I found no combination 
acceptable.   Just an ellipses could make it look
like the speaker is feigning enthusiasm (i.e., they really think the idea of 
a getaway is stupid), and ...! just looks
awkward to me, and doesn't conjur up the right reaction.   So I invented two 
marks, both of which are
variations on the ellipses.   For ...?, I added a wavy line or tilde above 
the ..., just as long as the three dots.   For
the last one, I added a kind of accent ague that extends the length of the 
three dots.

These were my ideas.   I never actually created a font with them, and it 
would seem useless to do so, since a
punctuation mark is only usefl to the extend that someone recognizes it, so 
that it would conjure up the same
intonational pattern in their head that it does in yours.   Oh well.

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/