Re: USAGE: What to do about punctuation?

Hi!

"Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...> writes:
> Those of you who have created your own scripts, what have you done
> punctuationwise?
First of all: I don't have a good overview over punctuation myself, so
I'd also like to see that.  If you have such a thing, you might want
to put it somewhere accessible.  A good source, however, is to read
the Unicode standard.  People around me often don't understand that I
can do such a strange thing, but I very often read it. :-) For the
scripts it contains, punctuation is usually a seperate section, often
with some brief explanations, so you'll get a good impression.

Many languages seem to have a paragraph and verse separator judging
from the Unicode charts.

Back to your question: Fukhian has a cursive, thus connected script
only.  I thought about how to terminate the letters, since they all
come from and go back to an upper baseline.  The natural answer was to
add punctuation at these points.  (Some fancy ordamented letters that
to not end on the baseline on both sides.)  Most punctuation is split
into two parts: one for the beginning of word, one for the end.  I
have:

@ beginning                   @ end
---------------------------------------------------
beginning of sentence         end of sentence
beginning of number           end of number
beginning of abbreviation     end of abbreviation
end of expectation            beginning of expectation
beginning emphasis of         end of emphasis
general beginning of word     general end of word

They are sorted by priority, thus if 'end of sentence' and 'end of
number' would be appropriate, 'end of sentence' would be used.

Emphasis is a bit like an exclamation mark except that it is more for
one word, so maybe you'd express that in English by italic or bold
font.

Another punctuation mark is for non-connected parts inside a word.  It
serves roughly the purpose of periods in abbreviations in English.

I have no markers for questions since Fukhian has question particles.
(Which does not mean you must not have question marks then, of
course. :-))

I'm not sure whether sub-clauses are unmarked in Fukhian or use the
sentence markers.  I think they are unmarked since there are particles
that mark them clearly.

Fukhian Script with Unicode-like charts:

http://www.theiling.de/projects/fuch/compiled/fuch.ps


Tyl Sjok is not so advanced yet, you I only have three punctuation
marker and I'm not sure they are stable:

    - a full stop for the end of sentences

    - a comma used after each end of sub-clause.
      (This is used very, very often since there is no morphology:
      all 'compounding' etc. is in clause level)

    - a sequence comma for otherwise unmarked coordination (this
      is roughly the comma in 'red, green and blue'.)

**Henrik

Reply