Talk:Punctuation

I've been thinking about the disambiguation of (punctuation) and (rhetoric) in the descriptions of apostrophe, period, comma, and so forth. These three, at any rate, were rhetorical figures first and then became punctuation marks used to indicate that the rhetorical figure was being employed. Granted, apostrophe has wandered pretty far away, but period still means "a sentence" as well as "the mark at the end of a sentence". Wouldn't it be more informative if these were discussed in the same article rather than separately, with links from both a general rhetoric article and a general punctuation article? Ortolan88

---

Braces and curly brackets.

Why does it matter to the definitions in here, if they are "unicode preferred" or not? To me, "curly brackets" is slang - {} are braces. According to www.m-w.com, they are "5 a : one of two marks { } used to connect words or items to be considered together" - it does not mention "curly brackets".

Under Bracket (punctuation), I'd also like some explanation of why they are used. Will see what I can determine.

While we're at it, should we add "angle brackets" (greater than/less than as used in html)?

--justfred

---

I added some examples under Bracket (punctuation). Could use some more, particularly the poetic or musical use of braces.

I also looked up the words braces and brackets, which, it would appear, the Unicode bureaucracy did not bother to do, and found that despite the accident of spelling, they don't even have the same derivation:

• braces comes from a word meaing "to enclose within the spread of two arms", same as embrace
• brackets turns out (get ready for this one!) to come from a word meaning "codpiece"! Think about it and you'll get it.

Ortolan88

---

I added a cross-reference to orthography. I think the existing content of this articles, and the "comma (punctuation)" etc. articles it references, is to describe

1. English orthography
2. Encoding of the appropriate characters in Unicode.

I think it would be improved if it were put in a larger context of "Latin script" (not Latin alphabet) orthography, with the English language rules added in as one part of the detail. The references to lexeme and grapheme would fit better if there were this context, in my opinion.

There'a slso a lot of room to add the history of the various marks, and the evolution of their usage over time.

--jdlh

---

I added space (punctuation) as a punctuation mark. The space has an interesting way of getting overlooked, because one doesn't make any marks to write it. I will argue that for the purposes of this article, it meets the test: "written symbols that do not correspond to either phonemes of a spoken language nor to lexemes of a written language, but which serve to organize or clarify writings".

Actually, it's actually an interesting philosphophical question whether the space is a punctuation mark or a convention of letters positioning. It certainly is non-trivial. Not all scripts have spaces for interword separation. The Latin script didn't have spaces until 900-something AD. I hope someone will explore these issues in the space (punctuation) article. (I've put these ideas there too.)

Also added interword separation and interpunct as part of adding the Space reference.

--jdlh

---

At 15:34 Jun 23, 2002, Art made an edit that put "more" into parens after the bullet. This looks to me like a note from Art to Art, "remember to put more in here." Can anybody (Art? You here?) explain what the "more" means or is for? If it is meaningful, can we perhaps get a clearer description?

Ducky[?]