tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 22 20:28:51 1999
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Re: *Egypt* Hol navmey
>From: [email protected]
>Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1999 18:51:17 EST
>
>I suspect they probably have at least commas and periods, but I doubt the
>existence of colons. We don't use them a whole lot in English. I suspect it
>also lacks the semicolon, the dash, the ellipsis, and the apostrophe. They
>may have parentheses and quotation marks. As for end punctuation, they may
>have the same mark to be equivalent to the period, the question mark, and the
>exclamation point. Of course, all of this is pure speculation.
Whatever punctuations they do (or do not) have, it's unlikely they match up
well with the ones we know from English in any sensible way. Hell, even
periods and commas and colons and dashes are used differently among various
Terran languages which share them (consider German, English, French,
Russian... all use them in subtly and not-so-subtly different ways). Would
they have no punctuation to introduce a list? Well, why wouldn't they have
one? Would it be the same as our colon? Not necessarily, maybe it would
be also used in other contexts where our colon isn't. You can guess at
some possibilities; things like syntactic breaks of various
strengths... think of them as varying strengths of comma, semicolon, and
period. Not necessarily equivalent, mind, nor even the same in number.
Maybe they punctuate between sentences in SAO construction, using the same
as they use at the ends of sentences; maybe it's a special one for that
usage. Or maybe nothing, as the {'e'} (or {net}) serves to flag the
sentence-join.
Yes, it's all speculation. It's just as likely they use nothing, or
something even stranger. Just that trying to say "they have period but not
comma" is not a meaningful way to look at it. You'd do better describing
the *functions* of the putative punctuations you're considering.
...I dunno, what we use dash for is probably pretty useful in Klingon; it's
underused in English. Apostrophe has specialized uses in English; we
haven't seen such in Klingon. But maybe there are (even separating verb
prefixes from verbs!). Apostrophes have wildly varying uses even in
Latin-alphabeted Terran languages: English uses it for possessives and
contractions, but contractions are a lot more common and formal and even
obligatory in French and Welsh and Gaelic. Breton actually has two letters
in the alphabet that are written "ch" and "c'h" respectively. Some
romanizations use apostrophe to mean ejectives, as the IPA does, or
aspiration.
Note also that many languages have managed quite happily with little or no
punctuation. Classical Sanskrit has middle-of-verse caesura and
end-of-verse, and something that works like an apostrophe (indicating a
deleted letter), and manages just fine with those. It also has a *word*
that functions a little like a spoken "unquote" mark (I am really hungry
unquote he said). I think many Asian languages only started using
punctuation recently, as did many Semitic languages. For something really
interesting, ask me about the traditional Masoretic Biblical
prosodic/musical cantillation marks, if you have an hour or so to spare.
Actually I have an article typed up about them someplace. It's a very
different (and in some senses more powerful) way of marking sentence
structure to what you might be used to with just periods and commas and
such.
But let's face it, punctuation makes life a lot easier for us as students
of the language. So don't be ashamed of doing it.
~mark