I was sitting next to a woman on the train today who was reading a book in Korean. (I think it was Korean, had lots of ovals). Anyway, what struck me was that there were the korean characters, but I also saw quote marks. A couple of more peeks, and there were all the punctuation that we use everyday with our alphabet: commas, exclamation, question marks, and periods.
A friend at work says it works the same way in sanskrit alphabets as well, (using “,.?!”)
How many other alphabets/characters (greek, chinese, japanese, etc.) use the same punctuation, or do any of them own their own set? I would imagine at one time they would have had their own, otherwise how would they have indicated surprise, query, dialogue, etc.
Was the set we use taken from some other older language? Or is it something relatively new, which is why its use is so widespead?
By the way, there is no “Sanskrit” alphabet. Sanskrit was originally written in alphabets (Brahmi) that are no longer used. Currently, Sanskrit can and is written in any alphabet descended from the Brahmi alphabets (Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, etc.). Today, Sanskrit is usually written in the Devanagari alphabet, which is the alphabet used for writing Hindi and some other Indo-Aryan languages, but the Devanagari alphabet is not the “Sanskrit alphabet.” If anything, it’s the “Hindi alphabet.”
Probably the first Indian alphabet to adopt Western punctuation was Bengali. Prior to that, the only punctuation mark was its equivalent of a period or full stop, which is a simple straight line.
Not entirely true, at least not about [ancient] Greek. While there was no punctuation, there were little ‘fragmentary’ words, stuck into sentences to imply that this was a question, etc.
FWIW, the current standard when reading ancient greek is a slight variation on English punctuation. The period and coma are the same, a raised period (at the top of the line) represents both a semicolon or a colon. An actual semicolon is the equivilant of a question mark. WHy this is standard, I have no idea.
This is also true of Latin. Ne at the end of of a verb indicates a questions, so “amatne me” means ‘does he love me?’ while “amat me” simply means ‘he loves me’.
Num and Nonne are also used. Num at the beginning of a sentence assumes a negative answer(surely you don’t) while nonne assumes the positive.
That only applies to yes/no questions, though. For a question like “How many parts is Gaul divided into?” (erm, sorry, “Into how many parts is Gaul divided?”), the only real clue is the use of a question word. Obviously, you can’t indicate questions in Latin with a certain word order, as is done in English and French, among others.
Has Japanese been mentioned yet? Modern Japanese uses borrowed English-style punctuation, including !, ?, and . (although it’s more like ° at the bottom of the line): . Quotation marks aren’t used; instead, Japanese uses square angled symbols (「」and 『』, if your browser supports it) at the top of the line for the beginning of the quotation and the bottom of the line at the end.
Chinese uses a fairly similar set of punctuation marks as are used in the Roman alphabet. I know some languages don’t, but I can’t think of any at the moment; it appears to be quite common to use this particular set. Does anyone know when they first came about, and became widely used in the Roman alphabet? They certainly weren’t during Roman times.
Javanese, Balinese and most Indic scripts for that matter (those descended from brahmi) use a simple set of punctuation: a single line for a comma, and two lines for a full stop. Javanese and Balinese seem to have adopted the colon :, but i’m not sure if this is a coincidental adaptation or not.
Javanese also has some very fancy marks used to indicate the status of someone, and whether or not a poem is being introduced, concluded, or if a new song is within a poem, etc.:
Pada-andap - introduces a letter to a person of lower rank
Pada-Madya - introduces a letter to a person of equal rank
Pada-luhur - introduces a letter to a person of higher rank
The difference is a up curving line on the left, which varies in height depending on the rank (low swoosh - lowest, highest swoosh - highest)