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eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)
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QotD

posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 05:24am on 2017-06-03

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2017-05-17:

"He uses commas grammatically. I deploy them musically." -- Toni Morrison, writer, on her disputes over the use of commas with her editor Robert Gottlieb.

[ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/24/books/robert-gottlieb-avid-reader-reluctant-writer.html]

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

[If I understand correctly, when punctuation marks were first introduced they were for indicating pauses of different lengths when reading aloud, and grammatical use came later.]

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flwyd: (step to the moon be careful)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] flwyd at 04:34am on 2017-06-05
Interesting aside on punctuation: since Chinese is a tonal language, you can't turn a statement into a question by raising your tone at the end, because that just makes it a different sentence. So the use of a question word is required. For basic affirmative/negative questions, Mandarin takes a statement and ads 吗 "ma" to the end. Other types of questions have different words, though we have those in English too (where, when, how many, etc.)
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