Re: USAGE: What to do about punctuation?

Mark wrote:

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

My impression of punctuation systems has been this:

There seems to be two types of design principles behind the different types
of punctuation, and they can often come into conflict.   The one is punctuation
that reflects the grammatical structure of the language.   This is the
thought behind language that, for example, require a comma before all subordinate
clauses (Esperanto does this; the Spanish I was taught; the German I was
taught).   English has an old rule whereby they say you're always supposed to put a
comma before "which" (e.g., "The man that I saw" is fine, but "The man which I
saw" is not; needs a comma after "man", according to the rule).

The other principle is the principle of using punctuation to record speech.
This is where the "comma = short pause; period = long pause" rules come in.
John Milton used this type of punctuation for his poetry.   In English, I
tend to punctuate this way and this way only.   And too, when I'm designing a
language, I tend towards this end of the spectrum.   However, I think (this is
just my thought; I haven't given it any study) that a mix of the two principles
is most natural.

-David

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