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Punctuation Counts!
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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 Punctuation Counts!
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In this era of "texting," when so many don't think punctuation matters, "as long as you can understand it," I would point out that today is International Apostrophe Day.
As for understanding the meaning of a written phrase, a couple of examples should suffice to drive home the importance of proper punctuation.
Take the following sentence that could be on a sign outside an apartment building: "Residents' refuse to be placed in trash cans."
Take away the apostrophe and we are left with a very different meaning" "Residents refuse to be placed in trash cans."
Another example demonstrating the importance of punctuation follows.
Take the sentence "Woman without her man is nothing." The meaning is reversed with the addition of punctuation: "Woman: without her, man is nothing."
So throw away your I-phones, buy a quill pen and an inkwell, and write letters using proper punctuation. Your friends will think you daft, but you will know you hold the moral high ground.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Aug. 15 2023 14:52:03
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: Punctuation Counts! (in reply to BarkellWH)
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The oldest full copy of Plato's Republic is found in a 9th century manuscript, the Codex Parisinus. It is written in Classical Greek, in scriptio continua, that is to say without any punctuation or spaces between words. Just one continuous flow of letters. That is how it would have been written in Plato's times. The Romans used the interpunct to separate words, but by the Classical period Greek influence was such that they took up the practice of scriptio continua. Meaning that many of the great authors of Classical Rome would have also written that way.
Punctuation starts to gain traction after Isidor of Seville started promoting silent reading. There was backlash from those who thought punctuation and spaces were a departure from the golden standard of Antiquity. And for a long time there was quite a bit of diversity in how punctuation was used, including within the confines of a single language. Standardization only really happened with the printing press.
There are many advantages to standardized punctuation, especially in a context where silent reading is widespread. That said, it is in some sense a crutch. You could argue that over-reliance on that crutch has come at the expense of our own ability to interpret a text, much in the same way that some have argued that writing came at the expense of developing a keen sense of memory. Not entirely sure what I think of it, but it is an argument you could make.
I'm afraid I find the argument by example to be rather tautological. Someone who writes "Woman without her man is nothing." and meant "Woman: without her, man is nothing." is deviating from the norm. To say this proves the importance of that norm is to say that the norm is important because deviations from that norm are... deviations from that norm... If we consider a hypothetical world where we still wrote in
scriptio continua (as do a number of Asian languages and they seem to be getting by just fine) and thus did not have this norm colouring our judgment, the meaning of those sentences wouldn't change at all. At worst they would be ambiguous. And in most cases context and co-text would be more than enough to nudge the reader in the right direction.
Personally I enjoy the innovations that have come about with texting and other forms of multimodal communication. Of course there's a bit of a social divide so it's always best to be cognisant of who is on the receiving end. But they allow me to do things I could not do otherwise. To me, these conventions are essentially no different than clothes. Freedom lies not in strict abidance to one convention over others, but rather in the ability to switch from one to the other according to circumstance.
I'm quite happy to live with both my iphone and bottle of ink. I do lament that for many the phone has entirely replaced letters though. If only because there's nothing quite as depressing as opening the mailbox and only finding bills and advertisements...
_____________________________
"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
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Date Aug. 15 2023 18:43:00
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Punctuation Counts! (in reply to Piwin)
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I read somewhere that Julius Caesar's contemporaries counted his ability to read silently as further evidence of his superior intellect.
I tried twice to take French at university. I had to drop out the first time due to a schedule conflict.
The second time the instructor constantly corrected my pronunciation. She was Vietnamese, and spoke English with a very strong accent. I asked myself, "Why should I trust her French pronunciation?" and dropped the course.
Years later I worked for a few years for the French government. All meetings in France were in English, and all French participants spoke excellent English.
One of my American colleagues spoke French fluently, but with an American accent audible even to me. When we were together, and some routine interaction in French was required, he would defer to me. When I asked him why, he said my accent was better--though I had done no formal study.
Waiting one morning to be transported to work I idly picked up a copy of Le Monde. To my surprise I found I could read it. That's when I realized that silent reading is subvocal. That is, it employs a part of your speech mechanism, but suppresses audible speech.
RNJ
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Date Aug. 16 2023 23:44:20
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Punctuation Counts! (in reply to Piwin)
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You bring up some interesting points in your post, particularly regarding the use of scriptio continua in writing certain languages, both ancient and modern. Having lived and worked in countries that use scriptio ontinua--Javanese, (Indonesia), Burmese, and Thai in my case--I can appreciate and agree with your assessment that "they seem to be getting by just fine." Of course they do so because they are acculturated, as we all are, in their languages, both spoken and written--from the beginning and throughout their lives.
That is the key--acculturation. It's not that we cannot cross the barrier. We in the West can learn to read Javanese, Burmese, and Thai, just as they can learn (and do so in much greater numbers) to read English. One is not better than the other. But I will still maintain that in the English speaking world, the use of punctuation is essential to be properly understood.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Aug. 17 2023 14:59:39
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Ricardo
Posts: 14806
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
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RE: Punctuation Counts! (in reply to kitarist)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: kitarist
quote:
I won't take advantage of you're weakness.
AAARGGHHHH MY EYES!!
I scored at the 88th percentile for orthographic imagery and at the 94th percentile for representational manipulation, so this tracks.
It was not a test though, it simply asked if one could do it, but did not test the actual ability. Of course I think I can! The problem for geometry in high school was two fold for me. 1. Proofs, and 2. Girl distractions in class.
After all, most of us are aware of “chunking” information in the modern age here, where correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar is temporally inefficient. FWIW, IMO,
ROTFL (which nobody ever literally did). WTF. PDL=GOAT
_____________________________
CD's and transcriptions available here:
www.ricardomarlow.com
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Date Aug. 22 2023 17:05:59
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: Punctuation Counts! (in reply to Ricardo)
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When arguing why English shouldn't be the global lingua franca, Claude Hagège refers to some plane crash where supposedly the difference between "Turn. Right now." and "Turn right. Now!" played a role. Sounds rather ludicrous ngl, but I've never looked into it so I don't know.
Without the shock value, I'd say American English speakers don't always realize just how difficult it is for non-natives to parse whether you're saying "can" or "can't", which is a pretty important distinction... In all dialects the thing doing the heavy lifting is not the "t" at the end, which ranges from barely audible to not audible at all, but rather the vowel. British people use different vowels so it's pretty straightforward. But Americans? Yeah good luck with that...
A few years ago there was a clip going around of Obama saying "Children can/can't flourish" where you just can't tell whether it's "can" or "can't". It's only when you hear the second part of the sentence - "if they're hungry" - that you can make sense of it. Basically the blue vs yellow dress schtick. Usually what it boils down to is whether you stress the word or not. If it's "can't", it's stressed. If it's "can", it's not stressed. You can reduce it to a little fart noise and it'll be interpreted as "can". Writing sometimes leads us to misunderstand how we actually speak. Most Americans are probably convinced that they're actually saying a fully-fledged "can" when really most of the time they're just making little fart noises. It's genius really. Just really hard to learn if you didn't grow up with it.
But that's neither here nor there. The real argument for language killing us comes from a minority school of thought (tiny really) in linguistics: the Leiden school, spearheaded by Kortlandt and van Driem. They hold that language is a parasitic organism. That sounds really out there (and it is a pretty popular idea in sci-fi, to it's easy to equate it with that), but it's not that big of a leap when you realize just how similar the processes of linguistic evolution and biological evolution are. It has been that way since the beginning: Schleicher came up with his tree model for Indo-European languages a few years before Darwin published his model for biological evolution. All the way up to the modern day where we have Richard Dawkins describing the replication of ideas as based on "memes", a kind of cultural equivalent to genes. The parallels are so strong that it's not surprising someone would conclude that language is an organism. And there is a kind of dualism implied in Dawkins's model that some of us aren't comfortable with. From there, they conclude that language is a parasite/symbiont. But they don't agree on whether it's mutualist or not.
I forget which one, but I think it's Kortlandt who thinks it's non-mutualist and that it'll eventually lead us to extinction. He argues that it reduces our perceptual capacities by taking over areas of the brain that would have otherwise been dedicated to that, and in exchange it has given us unprecedented power to change the environment around us, except that power might be ultimately destructive. So what you get is a species that is uniquely able to change its environment while at the same time being uniquely unable to perceive the environment it lives in. And that makes for a dangerous mix.
Definitely a small school of thought. In fact most linguists have probably never heard of it. But it is a challenging idea and pretty fun to play around with. What do you do if the very thing you use to conceptualize the world isn't on your side? Cormac McCarthy wrote an essay on why scientists sometimes report having made discoveries through visual imagination. He uses Kekulé as an example, the scientist who said the way he solved the structure of benzene was that he imagined a snake eating its own tail while he was day-dreaming. McCarthy asks why would his subconscious communicate through imagery instead of just saying "it's a ring, stupid!". He concludes that it's because the subconscious has been around for a lot longer than the conscious mind and it's just not used to using language yet. But at one point he remarks that it's as if the subconscious mind doesn't trust language. Connect that with the idea of language as a non-mutualist parasite and you've got yourself a scary scenario. Well, it makes for fun sci-fi anyway. Maybe all of known history is just one big story of the ant being led up the top of the grass blade by a parasite that needs to get in the stomach of a cow to reproduce. And as we climb we keep telling ourselves that this is progress, that being up on top of the blade of grass is better for us than being at the bottom. Until the cow shows up.
_____________________________
"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
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Date Aug. 24 2023 20:53:57
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RobF
Posts: 1611
Joined: Aug. 24 2017
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RE: Punctuation Counts! (in reply to Piwin)
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quote:
The real argument for language killing us comes from a minority school of thought (tiny really) in linguistics: the Leiden school, spearheaded by Kortlandt and van Driem. They hold that language is a parasitic organism.
Here is a link to George Van Dreim’s essay on the matter:
https://www.isw.unibe.ch/ueber_uns/e41180/e523709/e546130/2008d_ger.pdf
I haven’t read it yet, but I found the title “The Language Organism: Parasite or Mutualist?” and the early statement, “Some have misinterpreted the conception of language as an organism as no more than a metaphor. Yet Schleicher’s statement about language as a life form was unequivocally literal”, to be challenging.*
Regardless of any feelings or opinions I may have on the matter, the topic could still be fairly significant and relevant for study and consideration in today’s world due to the rise of AI-powered language models, such as ChatGPT. Matter of fact, someone should ask ChatGPT to write an essay on this. It would be interesting to see what the latest evolutionary step of the language organism has to say about itself. After all, it might be a true divergence, in the sense that AI-powered language could be seen to represent the birth of an entire new organism. If only metaphorically.
* I’m not even sure I can get past the presumption that humanity itself represents an organism. If so, it places language in the category of being a conduit between individual sentient organisms, which then would enable the existence of the supraorganism, humanity. So, it can’t be non-mutualist, it can’t even exist in the manner they describe, as they’re bestowing upon it qualities that it can’t, by definition, possess. Language can only exist as an organism if humanity exists as one, and if that is the case, then language becomes a conduit and no more. And, if humanity is not an organism, then language cannot be one, either, the whole argument is moot. If I’m making any sense, at all. AI-powered language may change the dynamics, but the original premise appears to be founded on a fallacy.
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Date Aug. 25 2023 2:08:30
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: Punctuation Counts! (in reply to RobF)
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Thanks for the link!
I've only skimmed through it for now but from this and from memory I don't think their idea of a language organism requires humanity as a whole to be some kind of superorganism. Nor are they saying that language across all of humanity is one single organism. It would be a parasitic species with, I suppose, as many individual organisms as there are humans. The parasite would just sit in any given individual's brain. Communication wouldn't be the parasite itself, but rather the way it spreads. Tbh that's what puts it in woo territory for me: We know how you can catch a cold from somebody else, or covid or whatever. But how that kind of transmission would happen through light and sound, which are the media for language, yeah it's pretty out there... It's an interesting idea but the mechanics of it are unclear to say the least. I think I mislead you with my ant analogy at the end. That was just me having fun but yeah that idea wouldn't be compatible with what they're saying.
Re: the sentence you quoted, what he's referring to is that a lot of 19th century linguists (like Schleicher) spoke of language in biological terms. He thinks they meant it literally. So do I. But the difficulty for me is that this was before the shift towards naturalism/physicalism so these were people who would also speak of things like souls and geists and also mean it quite literally. So, when someone like that says there's a "language organism", I'm not 100% sure whether they mean it in the same way I would or whether they mean something a bit different, something that might not be entirely rooted in naturalism. Van Driem touches on this in this essay saying that what we call soul is just the language organism, and since he's defining that organism in terms of neural groups it's a naturalistic account of the "soul". Which is fine. But I'm not so sure Schleicher and the other 19th century linguists were being equally naturalistic when they used terms like "soul" and whatnot. The lines between empirical science and more abstract philosophy were a bit more blurred than they are today.
_____________________________
"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
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Date Aug. 25 2023 15:28:54
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