Interpunct

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by CheskiChips, Nov 6, 2009.

  1. CheskiChips Banned Banned

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    Did Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic always have spaces?

    What interpuncts did they use?
     
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  3. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    The Wikipedia article on the space doesn't give much information. But it does tell us two things:
    • Ancient Hebrew and Arabic always used spaces between words because their vowel-less abjads made it too difficult to discern where one word left off and the next began.
    • On the other hand Latin, which does have vowels, was written without spaces until the mid-first millenium CE, although interpuncts (centered dots) had been used to separate words until around 200CE.
    The Wikipedia article on the interpunct seems to imply that Latin is the only language that used it as a word separator. In other languages it has/had a variety of meanings as a punctuation mark.
     
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  5. superstring01 Moderator

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    What about punctuation, in general, does it exist outside the Latin languages? Does Chinese use "periods" and "commas"?

    ~String
     
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  7. CheskiChips Banned Banned

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    Thanks, didn't find that one. I had read the one on interpunct wiki and it caused me confusion.
     
  8. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    I assume you mean "the languages that use the Latin alphabet." Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Occitan, Italian, Romanian (and a few other tongues like Romansh and Sicilian that are arguably only dialects) comprise the family of languages descended from Latin, but they're called the Romance languages.

    The Wikipedia article on Punctuation tells us that the other writing systems used virtually no punctuation until the last few centuries, when the technology of printing disseminated text in the punctuation-rich Latin alphabet (and its relatives Greek and Cyrillic) all over the world. The space between words was not uncommon, but that's not technically "punctuation" since it's not a mark.

    Capitalization is punctuation. But non-European alphabets, abjads, syllabaries and logograms don't have upper- and lower-case characters, so they cannot use capitalization to identify a name or the beginning of a new sentence.

    Bear in mind that the first writing systems were designed to record business transactions and keep track of debts. The technology of civilization required a way to manage a complex, asynchronous series of trades among strangers: the carpenter buys a pair of shoes, the cobbler buys a couple of jugs of ale, the brewer buys a new set of wagon wheels, the wheelwright hires a band to play for his daughter's birthday, and six months later the lutenist shows up at the carpenter's shop to buy a new armoire. In this type of recordkeeping, spacing and other organization was more important than punctuation marks.

    The oldest document we've found using punctuation goes back only three thousand years, and it only has marks to separate words and sentences. About 500 years later the Greeks invented a slightly more elaborate system of symbols (nothing more than groups of dots) whose purpose was to show actors how to read their lines with the proper phrasing and pauses. Around 100BCE the Romans did something similar, also to guide people in reading aloud.

    Punctuation, indentation and other typography began to be standardized as Christianity spread and priests read the Bible aloud to their congregations. (The Jews considered it everyone's duty to read and interpret the Scriptures for himself--and then argue endlessly about it

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    --and literacy was far more common among Jews, especially men, than among Christians.) Still, the early punctuation marks were few and simple, generally comprised of dots and straight lines.

    The technology of printing created an explosion of the quantity of material available to read, and in its wake literacy began to spread beyond the aristocracy and the priesthood. Common people who were not trained actors or priests, practicing the same text over and over, needed more marks to make sense out of the sentences, and this brought about the invention of the modern set of punctuation marks.

    These have continued to slowly adapt, for example to economize the use of ink in newspapers, and now to minimize characters in computerized communication. Today's character sets have a vast assortment of dingbats, and as some acquire standardized, non-verbal meanings, they have arguably become new punctuation marks. E.g.:

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    All of the European languages using the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets use essentially the same set of punctuation marks as English. However, the usage is not entirely uniform and this can be confusing. Greek uses the semicolon as a question mark, and Spanish places upside-down versions of both the question mark and the exclamation point at the beginning of the sentence, in addition to the normally oriented ones at the end, which greatly facilitate reading aloud. Quotation marks vary wildly; French and Russian use mirrored pairs of sideways carets, Spanish uses the em-dash.

    Most languages using other alphabets have borrowed our punctuation marks. The period, comma and question mark are particularly widespread, although in the Arabic alphabet (but not Hebrew) the question mark points the other way.

    The Devanagari script (used for Sanskrit and a few modern Indian languages) has its own extremely sparse set of punctuation marks, which were invented in the modern era.
    The CJK languages--Chinese plus Japanese and Korean, which use Chinese characters in addition to their own phonetic symbols--were unpunctuated until very recently. They have adopted the basic Latin set: period, comma, question mark, etc. In technical writing you'll see even more of our symbols such as parentheses--and you'll see even more of them in signs and other commercial text written for the expat community in the USA who read English as well as (or perhaps better than) we do.

    Written Chinese doesn't have the same problem that the Western languages do, of needing to coach an actor or anyone who's reading aloud in getting the pauses and other non-verbal sounds right. Since Mandarin has only 1600 one-syllable morphemes (roughly equivalent to words) but several thousand written characters, the spoken language is overwhelmed with homonyms and there's more information built into a written sentence.
     

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