Hi Rett, Gunnar:

Your explanations make sense. I'd guess the reason ancient text had no
spaces was because the real estate (paper medium) was prohibitively
expensive so they wanted to cram as much into as little space without regard
for legibility. Or it was such a time intensive labor to carve symbols into
stone or whatever other mediums they used...

-fk

-----Original Message-----
From: Pali@yahoogroups.com [mailto:Pali@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Gunnar
Gällmo
Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2005 4:48 AM
To: Pali@yahoogroups.com
Subject: SV: [Pali] exclamation point in pali suttas

--- frank <frank@...> skrev:

> Getting a daily dose of Bhikkhu Samahita's dhamma
> mailings, the question
> suddenly occurred to me how often does the
> exclamation point appear in the
> pali suttas, and who put it there?

As far as I know, the oldest Pali manuscripts, same as
all ancient manuscripts regardless of language, had no
interpunction marks at all - and strictly speaking,
even the space between words is an interpunction mark,
invented (if I remember correctly) in England
sometimes around the 8th or 9th century A. D. On
Scandinavian runestones, this space function is
sometimes filled by a :

BUTINANCIENTGREEKORROMETHEYDIDNTUSEANYSPACESORINTERPUNCTIONANDTHEDIDNTDISTIN
GUISHBETWEENCAPITALSANDORDINARYLETTERSEITHER

So you might understand why _silent_ reading was not
very common in the ancient world - when you read a
letter, you had to think a lot just do understand what
was actually written, even if it was in your own
mothertongue...

And you might understand that when you try to
translate ancient texts, whether in Pali or in other
languages, the first thing to do is to edit the
original text and make it intelligible. The PTS did a
lot of work with that.

(With the Old Testament and the Koran, it is even
verse, as old Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts usually
contain the consonants, and perhaps some of the long
vowels, but never the short ones. That's how Jahveh
became Jehovah; in the written text it's just JHVH -
and when reciting Hebrew texts in a synagogue,
pronouncing this word is taboo, so then JHVH is
replaced by Adonai...)

--- rett <rett@...> skrev:

> Ancient Indian punctuation is very simple, and
> there's nothing corresponding to an exclamation
> point or a question mark that I've heard of. It's
> just a bar | and a double bar || (hope the symbols
> show properly).

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.

Gunnar

gunnargallmo@...


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