Re: USAGE: What to do about punctuation?

En réponse à Mark J. Reed :


>Those of you who have created your own scripts, what have you done
>punctuationwise?
I quite often work on the punctuation of my scripts (it's for me about as
important as the scripts themselves. Even the absense of punctuation must
be accounted for ;))) ). So I can give you quite a few examples.

My Astou is supposed to be spoken in a far past, and is written in a
derived form of the Greek alphabet. As such, it has no punctuation at all.
Azak uses suffixes to indicate interrogation and exclamation, etc... so it
doesn't need that much punctuation. It only has the equivalent of the full
stop (a vertical bar the size of the characters) and of the comma (a
vertical bar half the size of the characters).
Reman and Narbonósc being Romance languages, they use the same kind of
punctuation as French.
Chasmäöcho was kind of a first attempt at an obnoxious language ;))) and
thus uses a strange punctuation, yet based on the punctuation marks
everybody knows (since it's written in the Roman alphabet). I don't
remember everything about it (and I don't have my note at hand), but IIRC
the semi-colon was used to mark question (Greek-like), the colon to mark
exclamations, and they were used both at the beginning and end of the
sentence (Spanish-like, but without invertion). Also, the comma was used
for the full stop, and the dot (full-stop) was the hyphenation character.
Itakian is the last language I worked the punctuation of. It is quite
special because it normally doesn't put spaces between words, is written
from right to left and each line can contain at most one sentence. So
there's no equivalent of the full-stop for instance (the end of the line is
the end of the sentence, normally). It has only two marks:
- the pause, which looks a bit like a diamond of cards, and is used to
indicate pauses in speech in the sentence (typically, it's put between
phrases).
- the continuator, which is used at the end of a line if the sentence was
too long to be written on one line. This character indicates that the
sentence carries on in the next line. It looks like the pause sign but with
a long tail added to it.

I've unfortunately not had time to work on Maggel's punctuation.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.