>
>Those bars can be seen in some Devanagari manuscripts,
>but I don't know when one began to use them. After
>all, Devanagari has been the standard script for
>Sanskrit for only about 250 years, and I don't know if
>the old Brahmi script had anything corresponding to
>those bars.

Yes looking at it now I think you're right that even those bars can be a fairly recent development.

In printed Sinhalese Pali texts I see western punctuation including commas, periods, colons, semi-colons, quotation marks and question marks. Scanning through I haven't found an exclamation mark yet, but don't see why there couldn't be one. So another guess would be that the texts Frank is reading were translated from a modern SE Asian alphabet which uses western punctuation in its edited Pali texts. Like I said, just a guess. In that case it would have mostly likely 'entered' the Pali during the modern editing process.

best regards,

/Rett