My great-grandfather taught English, and he liked to enlighten his students as to the importance of proper punctuation by posing this...
Punctuate this to render meaning:
that that is is that that is not is not
That that is, is; that that is not, is not.
that, that is, is that! that is not "is not"?!
BYB wins my great-grandfather's award, and tsuwm wins the creativity ribbon.
I remember there being a similar exercise in grade school, to the effect of:
Mary: "Mom, do you mind helping me with my homework?"
Mom: "No, I don't want to do it now."
punctuated properly, Mom's response has an entirely different meaning:
"No, I don't. Want to do it now?"
that that is is that that is not is not is not that so
I vaguely remember the existence of one that could be taken as a male chauvinist rant when punctuated one way and as a sharp feminist rebuttal when punctuated another.
Makes you wonder what the Elizabethans did, before the rules of punctuation settled themselves. At first I wondered how Aristotle, Seneca, Lucretius and other ancient writers managed, but then it occurred to me that Latin and Greek have such elaborate grammar that lack of punctuation could hardly matter.
There isn't any punctuation in Asiatic languages, like Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, etc. is there? Obviously they manage. Perhaps some of our Asian experts can enlighten us.
How about the maiden's plea: don't stop don't stop don't stop don't stop don't stop ( seven "!'s")
In reply to:
At first I wondered how Aristotle, Seneca, Lucretius and other ancient writers managed
Julius Caesar was well known, among other things, for the fact that he could read to himself. Everybody else read out loud all the time because it was the only way to cope with the fact that not only was there no punctuation there were no spaces between the words. It must have been absolute bedlam in public libraries.
Bingley
But could Caesar read to himself without moving his lips?
I saw an illustrative sentence in a "wordplay" book (or maybe it was in a usage book) several years ago and the first point of the sentence(which was about 10 to 12 words long) was that it it made "sense" with a comma after the first word. Then the comma was placed after the second word, at which point the meaning was changed, but the sentence still made sense. Then the comma was moved to the third word, with the same type of resulting changes, and so on until the comma was placed after the penultimate word of the sentence,with the meaning still changing and the sentence still making sense. It was a most perfect illustration of the importance of punctuation and how it affects the meaning of a sentence. The problem is that I cannot remember where I saw it, although I know it is in a book which I own. I'll keep looking, but meantime, if anyone knows of this sentence or can find it through the usual or unusual sources, please advise or post it up.
BTW, as lawyers, perhaps more than most, are well aware, the placement of a comma in a contract -particularly in an insurance policy - is often the difference beween winning and losing a case. Case law is replete with instances of judges seeking to decipher (Construe) intent from the presence or absence of a comma or from its placement in the sentence. Enough, for me, about commas for now. Let's reserve discussion about the "Oxford comma/Harvard comma" until another day.
Here's another challenge. Punctuate the following sentences. Simultaneous note and hint. The joke (It's a bit dodgey and very, very old) only works with "American" punctuation, not, e.g. British "full stop". Here are the sentences.
Fun Fun Fun Worry Worry Worry
This one, Bobyoungblatt, dates from the era when we were in college.
Fun, just once, can lead to worry,worry,worry.
Makes you wonder what the Elizabethans did, before the rules of punctuation settled themselves.
Just finished a book, Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It's Heading, by Naomi S. Baron, that covers questions like this. The short answer is that the rules of punctuation still haven't settled themselves. There are basically two schools of thought about punctuation. The grammatical and the rhetorical. The rhetorical, punctuate to indicate the breaths taken while reading aloud, came first since the primary purpose of punctuation was to aid in the out loud reading of texts. More later, I gotta go.
Was it Peter Sellers who recorded the song "What is this thing called love?" putting the emphasis on each word in turn, and changing the meaning of the sentence each time. And was it a takeoff of Larry Olivier's voice? It's many years since I last heard this track.
[deep bow of homage emoticon]
Scribbler, taking yours and my lovely Bill's hints, I offer the following. I notice you did not specify how many sentences.
Fun! Fun!? Fun??? Worry? Worry?! Worry!!!
My sweet paulb, I checked a lyrics site--one only out of many--and found three albums listed as having Peter Sellers
singing. Only one was all him, though, and not any of the songs was "What is this thing called love". I miss you.
An edited note: I really do not have a clue as to why my
posts are so oddly spaced. They look normal when I type them.
Time for the answer to the punctuation challenge.
Remember that this was going around in the late 50s. Seems very dated and corny in these days but is appropriate to the topic. The answer:
Fun(Period)Fun(Period)Fun(NO period!)Worry! Worry! Worry!
As I hinted for British readers, "Full stop" doesn't work in this case.
I vaguely remember the existence of one that could be taken as a male chauvinist rant when punctuated one way and as a sharp feminist rebuttal when punctuated another.
Woman without her man is nothing.
Woman - without her, man is nothing.
{blue]There isn't any punctuation in Asiatic languages, like Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, etc. is there? Obviously they manage. Perhaps some of our Asian experts can enlighten us.
I'll leave the Hindi to someone else!
Modern Chinese and modern Japanese both have punctuation. Classical Chinese (I don't know about classical Japanese either) didn't. This combined with miscopying, as in the Western world, to create different interpretations of the same work and keep lots of scholars busy.
Different issue, but a lot of classical Chinese poetry gains power by what to Westerners appears to be imprecision. Not knowing the subject of the verb, or whether nouns are singular or plural. 'Mountain hear person voice.' No idea how many mountains, how many people, who hears the voice. If you can forget to worry about all that you can concentrate instead on a reaction to the sound of humanity against the vastness of nature. A whole image that no single English translation can really get at.
(In case you hadn't got it, the classical poetry was a part of my course I really loved
)
There isn't any punctuation in Asiatic languages, like Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, etc. is there? Obviously they manage. Perhaps some of our Asian experts can enlighten us.I'll leave the Hindi to someone else!
Modern Chinese and modern Japanese both have punctuation. Classical Chinese (I don't know about classical Japanese either) didn't. This combined with miscopying, as in the Western world, to create different interpretations of the same work and keep lots of scholars busy.
Different issue, but a lot of classical Chinese poetry gains power by what to Westerners appears to be imprecision. Not knowing the subject of the verb, or whether nouns are singular or plural. 'Mountain hear person voice.' No idea how many mountains, how many people, who hears the voice. If you can forget to worry about all that you can concentrate instead on a reaction to the sound of humanity against the vastness of nature. A whole image that no single English translation can really get at.
(In case you hadn't got it, the classical poetry was a part of my course I really loved
)
Hey Bob
I'm making this up here, but classical Sanskrit too, like Greek and Latin, was an inflected language, was highly agglutinative (like German?) and therefor word order, and punctuation, were not critically important for meaning.
In modern day Hindi, however, most Roman punctuation is used, though in place of a full stop (or period), Hindi usually sticks to the traditional vertical line '|'
Other Northern Indian languages (of the Indo-European family) have, to a greater or lesser degree, adopted punctuation.
Sanskrit, in its earliest days, was almost invariably written (or rather composed, orally) in verse (the shloka, allegedly invented by Valmiki so as to enable him to tell the tale of the Ramayana), so with the lines well end-stopped, meaning was relatively clear without the need for elaborate punctuation.
That's about the limit of my knowledge (and I've made up most of it)
cheer
the sunshine warrior
In reply to:
But could Caesar read to himself without moving his lips?
I don't have the reference about Caesar to hand to quote exactly, but some 400 years later, here is Augustine's comment on Ambrose, bishop of Milan (translated by Henry Chadwick):
When he was reading, his eyes ran over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. He did not restrict access to anyone coming in, nor was it customary even for a visitor to be announced. Very often when we were there, we saw him silently reading and never otherwise. After sitting for a long time in silence (for who would dare to burden him in such intent concentration?) we used to go away. We supposed that in the brief time he could find for his mind's refreshment, free from the hubbub of other people's troubles, he would not want to be invited to consider another problem. We wondered if he read silently perhaps to protect himself in case he had a hearer interested and intent on the matter, to whom he might have to expound the text being read if it contained difficulties, or who might wish to debate some difficult questions. If his time were used up in that way, he would get through fewer books than he wished. Besides, the need to preserve his voice, which used easily to become hoarse, could have been a very fair reason for silent reading. Whatever motive he had for his habit, this man had a good reason for what he did.
Chadwick has footnote that "In antiquity, silent reading was uncommon, not unknown."
Bingley
"What! Now? - my love?" was a favourite song title.
Rod Ward