Punctuation

valval

very interesting did not know any of this well done dell

joanlawson

Thanks Del, that's an interesting post.

The beginnings of punctuation lie in classical rhetoric--the art of oratory. Back in ancient Greece and Rome, when a speech was prepared in writing, marks were used to indicate where--and for how long--a speaker should pause.

These pauses (and eventually the marks themselves) were named after the sections they divided. The longest section was called a period, defined by Aristotle as "a portion of a speech that has in itself a beginning and an end." The shortest pause was a comma (literally, "that which is cut off"), and midway between the two was the colon--a "limb," "strophe," or "clause."

It's strange to think that the favourite mark of England's first printer, William Caxton (1420-1491), was the forward slash / Some writers of that era also relied on a double slash (as found today in http://) to signal a longer pause or the start of a new section of text. We think of that as a modern thing, but it isn't at all.

Fashions in punctuation continue to change. In modern prose, dashes are in; semicolons are out. Apostrophes are either sadly neglected or tossed around like confetti, while quotation marks are seemingly dropped at random on unsuspecting words. Punctuation is governed "two-thirds by rule and one-third by personal taste." I suppose that it ever will be so.

frogmorton

[
Fashions in punctuation continue to change. In modern prose, dashes are in; semicolons are out. Apostrophes are either sadly neglected or tossed around like confetti, while quotation marks are seemingly dropped at random on unsuspecting words. Punctuation is governed "two-thirds by rule and one-third by personal taste." I suppose that it ever will be so.[/quote]


I suppose this is fair enough in some respects....that's how it evolved anyway according to Del's piece :???:

such is life!

love

toni xx

v interesting both thanks

tonesp

Any of you sages out there know why the Spanish put exclamation and question marks at the beginning and also at the end of sentence And invert the first one x:-? x:-? x:-?

tonesp

delboy wrote:

The upside down question mark is to show where the beginning of the question is. ¿cómo estás? Same with the exclamation ¡Ayúdame!

Gracias por su ayuda Amigo
Just like quotation marks I see now However Is there any other language that follows this pattern? I know french doesn't neither does Greek After those two I'm stuffed Or is it a peculiarly Spanish thing?

joanlawson

I think that the use of inverted question marks and exclamation marks is unique to Spain, Tone.

In Armenian the question mark ( ՞ ) takes the form of an open circle and is placed over the last vowel of the question word.

In Greek , the question mark is a semicolon at the end of the sentence ( ; )

In Arabic and languages that use Arabic script and were influenced by the Arabic language such as Persian and Urdu, which are written from right to left, the question mark ( ؟ ) is mirrored right-to-left from the English question mark.