Punctuation
valval
Member Posts: 14,911
very interesting did not know any of this well done dell
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Comments
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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.0 -
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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 thanks0 -
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:-?0
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delboy wrote:The upside down question mark is to show where the beginning of the question is. ¿cómo estás? Same with the exclamation ¡Ayúdame!
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?0 -
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.0
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