Missed edit window:
Now imagine hearing this phrase comma double quote what apostrophe ve you been up to lately question mark double quote period
[Moderating]
Dana Scully, does that have any relevance at all to the topic of discussion, or were you just looking for random places on the board to use inappropriate potty language? Do you randomly drop in English cusses just because people are speaking English?
What I mean is that the purpose of punctuation marks is to help a reader reproduce the tone-of-voice and inflection part of spoken language. Question marks do not correspond to phonemes but do correspond to specific inflections; comas, colons, semicolons, ellipsis and periods indicate pauses, and so forth.
Remember: the written form is always an expression of the verbal/signed form. Punctuation marks don’t merely have a decorative function nor do they represent grammatical functions which exist only in writing: they actually convey important information about “how would this be said out loud”. One of the issues with text-based communication is precisely the loss of part of the information conveyed by inflection and tone; that is, by punctuation marks.
They often do, but they don’t always, at least in English. Commas, in particular, often require looking up the rules in style guides, and the style guides don’t always agree. (See: Oxford comma vs non-Oxford styles. Whether you include that final comma has no bearing on how the sentence is said orally–it’s simply a stylistic convention for the printed word.) Or suppose I wrote a sentence like “I went to the store, and then to the doctor’s.” Where as I do pause between those two halves of the sentence, written style guides would tell you NOT to use the comma there, as that following the common is not an independent clause.
So, yes, punctuation in English does often communicate information about how a sentence would be said aloud, but not always. As I said in another thread, back in the days when I would copyedit, I often had to correct many comma errors because writers just went “by ear.” There are many times in English where a sentence flows without pause, but style requires comma placement. There are other times where natural pauses occur in a sentence, but style eschews the comma.
Yeah but that’s because there have been evolutions in spoken or written language which have not kept up with each other. And in the case of this particular language, English is famously horrid about phonetic correspondence: why would it be any better at indicating tone, inflection and pauses?
That used to be true, and it still mostly is, but not quite “always” any more. Consider, for instance, the word “pwn”: How is it pronounced? A consensus has now mostly emerged for “pown” (rhyming with “own”), but for a good while after it was coined, there were a sizable number who rendered it as “pawn”, or even a few for “poon” (by analogy with “cwm”). Because, unlike almost all words before it, it was coined and first used in a textual context, not spoken.
Something similar is now occurring with emojis. Some of them replace facial expressions and the like that would be seen in spoken communication, but not all. One might dispute whether they even count as “words”, but they fill the same purpose.
And even punctuation like question marks do not necessarily reveal tone. Questions can (and are often) said with a falling tone in English, not just a rising one (and in other languages, as well.) ( <- Actually, that “as well” set off by a comma is a good example where I would never put a pause between the words on either side, but written style dictates its placement to set it off visually.) The question mark is there as a visual symbol of an interrogative, but does not necessarily reflect the tone of the question. And there are plenty of other types of punctuation – quotation marks, hyphens, en-dashes, etc. – that are visual and do not represent the way something is spoken in any way, but rather aid in visual parsing.
Japanese doesn’t have an intonation change for questions, instead there is a “question word” (ka) which is a spoken question mark. As such, Japanese didn’t have question marks until after contact with Western countries.