tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Aug 30 07:56:31 1993
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Instrumentals, and just a wee bit more on relative clauses..
- From: (Mark E. Shoulson) <[email protected]>
- Subject: Instrumentals, and just a wee bit more on relative clauses..
- Date: Mon, 30 Aug 93 09:56:24 -0400
- In-Reply-To: Will Martin's message of Fri, 27 Aug 93 17:46:03 EDT <[email protected]>
>From: Will Martin <[email protected]>
>Date: Fri, 27 Aug 93 17:46:03 EDT
>X-Mailer: UVa PCMail 1.8.4
>Content-Length: 1441
>On Aug 27, 3:33pm, (Mark E. Shoulson) wrote:
>...
>> I don't think punctuation or conjunctions should have to be mandatory.
>>
>> ~mark
>This is just a reminder that TKD gives NO guidance WHATSOEVER on
>punctuation. It doesn't even acknowledge its existence. Note: The examples in
>TKD never end with periods, even when they are complete sentences and clauses
>and phrases are never set apart from the remainder of sentences with commas.
>Quotations never use quotation marks.
That's right, there's no guidance. That's why it should be optional.
Basically, I assume that if there's any punctuation in Klingon (and I am
far from sure there is), we certainly don't know about it. So to make our
own lives easier, we use, by convention, punctuation rules that we're
familiar with, just to help out our poor terran brains in working with an
unfamiliar language. It's just a mental hook, really. Similarly, I've
seen various punctuation used with Lojban (which explicitly uses no
punctuation that is no realized as a word or sound) just to help break it
up for the eyes of the readers a little easier. As I say, use the
punctuation if you like, but it's not required.
~mark