Re: Kacc 271

Yes, Jim, I rather assumed that you already knew that the question
mark (?) is not among the ancient glyphs of the Pali language.

The Sinhalese have only a single mark of punctuation in their Pali
manuscripts, the "sacred scribble" (the Sinhalese word is something
like "Kundalliya") --which serves as everything from a hyphen to a
paragraph mark.

It's a different story for every MS tradition, but the transition to a
printed text (in western book form) invites various innovations (such
as the comma and question mark) --and, as I say, these tend to reflect
the interpretation of the text as it is "transposed" from leaf to
printed page (e.g., where they place commas shows where they thought
one example ends and the next begins, etc.)

E.M.