Punctuation

[TurtIe Tracks]

So while I was thinking of punctuation for my conlang, I asked my study teacher about punctuation of other languages. (Questions like, do most languages use a question mark?) He teaches, and he also knows ancient greek, and he told me that ancient greek has like no punctuation at all. (you have to figure it out from particles) I thought that was pretty interesting... I mean if most punctuation is fairly modern (didn't japanese use to only have a period?) and your conlang is supposed to be ancient that'd be something to consider. I don't want to mimic all the punctuation in english but by now I'm so used to it I'm not sure how I'd go about making new punctuation or getting rid of some... I just can't live without commas and ellipses... (as you can tell from this paragraph) and parentheses, exclamation points (I like expression, if you're writing dialogue in your conlang it's useful) quotation marks, etc.

So how do you deal with punctuation in your conlang? If you eliminate any of them, how do you express it in your conlang? Have you made any punctuation? And if you have a conscript, how do you come up with the look of your punctuation?  

[Czarevich]

Not in conlang terms, but Armenian has a somewhat different punctuation system. For example:

The full stop : (no, that isn't a colon).
Ես չեմ հասկանում:
Yes chem haskanum.
I don't understand.

The question mark ՞ .
Ինչպե՞ս ես:
Intchpe?s es.
How are you?
(This one is rather interesting. It's placed after the last vowel in the work it's inflecting as the question word. The full stop is still used in tandem with it.)

The exclamation mark ՜ .
Ես Հայերե՜ն եմ սիրում:
Yes Hayere!n em sirum.
I love Armenian!
(Similarly, the full stop is used here and the exclamation is placed after the ultimate syllable's vowel.)

 

[Song Wei]

I always found the use of punctuation just annoying and another way to confuse everything...

most of my languages have participles that explain the meaning the sentence is intending, such as words that you say before the sentence that automatically tells the listener that it will be a question (which kind of question, asking to do, asking for, or asking about) and then there are command participles and many others, and then words at the end of a sentence to change the amount and so much more. but I don't usually use punctuation... it just gets in the way, plus I always make the spoken first, so the written language needs no punctuation, but usually I just draw a large line at the end of the script that obviously means there is no more.  

[Henneth Annun]

I was actually thinking of a conscript where sentences had radicals over them or under them to mark them as such. A question would have the radical over it, a statement would have it under it. Orders/commands would have no radicals at all. The letters would have different forms depending on what type of statement they were in.  

[Tesar Eshne]

The only "Punctuation" in Pilael are the dot between words of the same phrase and the colon between phrases of the same thought. I guess there's also a way to indicate quoted speech, but it's not used that much, since there's also grammatical ques as to when quoted speech starts.

However, there are particles that act as punctuation through setting the "mood" for the piece. Questions, exclamations and such are distinguished by these.  

[Layra-chan]

Punctuation is a useful but rather bizarre phenomenon, since spoken language doesn't use it; instead we use a number of paralinguistic cues, context (which should work just as well in written language) and gesture.

All the usual punctuation marks are realized morphologically and pronounced in nerurav. Instead of question marks there's a particle indicating general uncertainty (for yes-no questions), as well as a prefix that, attached to a noun, verb, adjective or adverb, indicates an uncertainty in the word its attached to; "what...?" becomes "?noun", "when...?" becomes "?tense", and so on.
Exclamations follow a similar construction.
Parentheses, quotation marks, anything indicating an inserted clause are marked by suffixes so that the clause can be interspersed with words from outside the clause.
A pause between sounds has a particular symbol indicating a beat of silence, and the full stop at the end of a sentence, pronounced as a hum, is the symbol for pause along with the marker indicating that it's voiced.  

[Abbymoris]

Agree with you. Multilingual customer support is very important, especially for automatic and semi-automated translations. When a resource can provide translations for 90 language pairs, I agree that this is cool and in demand. Each language has its own characteristics, so using the experience of such resources, you can not worry about the quality of the translation.