stoutfellow

p_o_u_n_c_e_r offered some interesting comments on my previous post on punctuation, and deserves a full-size response, under the cut.

His general point was that we could use more punctuation marks. This is undoubtedly true, but there are a handful of problems to be dealt with. First, writing is invariably - perhaps inevitably - more conservative than speech, and reform is difficult. If the power of a government is thrown into the balance - e.g., in the Soviet Union after the revolution - a major reform can be enforced; otherwise, it takes very special circumstances to succeed. Noah Webster's relatively minor spelling reforms were supported by a general desire for USAns to distinguish themselves from the English, and were successful; less than a century later, Melvil Dewey's larger-scale reforms went nowhere, despite the support (if I recall correctly) of Robert McCormick's media empire. The introduction of new punctuation would, I think, face similar difficulties. (Witness the push, some forty years ago, for the - certainly useful - interrabang.)

From the elocutionist point of view, it would be good to be able to represent a wider range of sentence-level intonation patterns. The current system, at the top level, has only three options, the period, the question mark, and the exclamation point - and as their names suggest, their origin is more syntactic, or even semantic. (The intonation contours of yes-no questions and content questions are not the same, for example.) Unfortunately, we don't yet know enough about sentence-level intonation. Linguists have long had a standardized notation for individual sounds, the International Phonetic Alphabet, and there seems to be some agreement on the representation of word-level intonation, such as is used in tonal languages like Mandarin or Vietnamese; but no such agreement exists for sentence-level intonation. (My impression is that there isn't much on the table, even, at this point.)

New punctuation, if it arises (and I agree with

p_o_u_n_c_e_r that the present situation is somewhat favorable to it), will probably arise more-or-less spontaneously; the question is whether, and how quickly, it will spread.

p_o_u_n_c_e_r mentions the use of italics to represent emphasis in online communication, which is fairly widespread; the fact that it's been used that way in printed work probably facilitates that spread. Absent such predisposing factors, transparency seems to be decisively important. For example, emoticons enjoy wide use, at least in part because, once one grasps the idea of an emoticon, the coining and interpretation of new icons is quite easy.

There is another limiting factor; I'm not sure how important it will ultimately be. For much e-communication, the default encoding is seven-bit ASCII, and new punctuation almost has to draw on that base. In that context, I use paired asterisks to indicate emphasis, and I think that's fairly transparent, but I notice that they are used, in some quarters, to indicate "stage directions" - comments on what the speaker is doing, or wishes to be perceived as doing, in the midst of speech. (I use "speaker" metaphorically, of course, since it is precisely not speech that is involved!) Which of these two uses will spread - both may! - remains to be seen. One or both might be short-circuited by the ongoing spread of HTML-based communication, of course.

Turning to some of

p_o_u_n_c_e_r's specific suggestions:

the trailing off of spoken thoughts can indicate either the end of thought or the continuation. "Find some money somewhere, but I dunno..." End of thinking. "Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison ..." Continues, etc, you know. All those guys.

Or both at the same time. "A neverending battle for Truth, justice, and -- uh -- that other thing ..." The actual thought / memory has reached its limit but the speaker wants to indicate that there is more to the thought than can actually be conveyed.

It seems to me there is a useful distinction to be drawn between the two types. As if in the one case you make the grasping at empty air gesture "nothing there" while in the other you made the twirling finger "and so on" gesture. Maybe "..." for the one and ". . ." for the other.

It's possible that this distinction would be a useful one; I'm not sure how well-delineated it is, though, since - as mentioned - both forms can co-occur. In any event, relying on spacing to distinguish the two seems less than satisfactory. Transparency is also an issue; how do you get your readers to correctly interpret them, without (repeatedly) telling them the distinction? And among those who might be willing to adopt the distinction, how many of them will a) be willing to describe it to yet others and b) use it in more-or-less the same way as you wish them to?

We also need a distinction between actual quotes and scare quotes and for Ghod's sake we need to stop the people who use quote marks for emphasis. I "really" hate that.

I'm not sure that we need a distinction between the two first-named kinds of quotes. (Note that it's a syntactic/semantic distinction, not an elocutionary one!) The proper (ahem) uses of quotes do, I think, have one common characteristic: they are drawing attention to the words used, rather than to their content. "He said John is coming": the content of his words, whatever they may have been, was that John was coming. "He said, 'John is coming'": the precise words he used were "John is coming" - interpret that as you will. The stipulative use of quotation marks - "A 'group' is a set equipped with a binary operation, subject to the following conditions" - again serves to specify that this word "group" is henceforth to be used with this meaning. Horror quotes indicate that this word is used here, but the speaker is not willing to commit to its appropriateness: "This 'Messiah' has considerable support among the power elite". All of these, then, have that common element, and it's reasonable to use the same symbol in each case. A possible rejoinder is that most people don't recognize that common element... As for emphatic quotes, I think we're just going to have to live with them, as we live with the greengrocer's apostrophe, pointing and laughing and trying to discourage their use, but in the awareness that they aren't going to go away.

A useful though annoyingly overused marker of speech is the rising, questioning, inflection used to solict agreement and permission to continue. Y'know? Needs a new punctuation mark I think. Something like a little arrow pointing sideways and up -- maybe -^

How useful, though, would this be? By its very nature, the marker is useful in face-to-face conversation, less so, or not at all, in time-lagged forms of communication. About the only time the symbol would be used there is in representation of dialogue - or monologue, I suppose. In any case, the suggested symbol doesn't strike me as particularly transparent. Some variation on the question mark, or a symbol incorporating it, might have a better chance of acceptance.

I'm not particularly sanguine about major changes to our present punctuation system, even in the volatile world of e-communication. There will probably be smaller-scale changes, such as those I've mentioned above, but - barring intervention by some entity with great prestige or power (Microsoft?) - that's about it.