USAGE: What to do about punctuation?

First, an OT reply and thank-you to John Cowan for his help; new
thread starts below.

RM = Roger Mills
MR = Mark Reed (me)
JC = John Cowan

RM> Even simpler-- Right Alt-/ and RightAlt-1-- ¿ ¡ (at least
RM> if your keybd is set to US Intl.?)

MR> Hm, that doesn't work for me.

JC> In XP the keyboard state is per-application, so you have to click on
JC> Notepad to set the keyboard focus and *then* change the keyboard state.

Ah so!  That indeed does the trick.  Dand zadurzkem.


This mention of punctuation has me wondering what, if anything, I
should do about punctuation in my con-script for Okaikiar.  I'd like to
do a survey of existing natlang scripts, but Daniels' book
seems to be unavailable for the forseeable future, and the Unicode
standard is too inclusive (it has many little-used and obsolete characters)
to give a good sense of what's really used in practice.  It does seems
as though a lot of scripts didn't have much, if any, native punctuation
and just tacked on the marks used with the Roman alphabet in western
Europe, reversed as appropriate for R-L scripts.  (I do find it interesting,
though, that the Greek question mark looks like our semicolon.)

Do script features tend to run in groups, like language features?
Does the presence of a comma, say, imply the presence of a period?
A question mark (at least in languages that don't have a particle
for that)?

Those of you who have created your own scripts, what have you done
punctuationwise?

Thanks in advance for any help.

-Mark

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