Eats, Shoots & Leaves came out 20 years ago. I remember reading it but as you can see I didn’t take it to heart for these posts.
Punctuation, all ten representatives of which can be found in the introduction to this text, turns out to be a universal and indispensable complement to the mathematical perfection of every language studied.
A curve of this type has a characteristic shape: it grows rapidly at first and then, after reaching a maximum value, descends somewhat more slowly to a certain critical value, below which it reaches zero with small and constantly decreasing dynamics. The Weibull distribution is usually used to describe survival phenomena (e.g. population as a function of age), but also various physical processes, such as increasing fatigue of materials.
The results here are clear: the language characterized by the lowest propensity to use punctuation is English, with Spanish not far behind;
Punctuation in literature of major languages is intriguingly mathematical
More intriguing is this study that breaks punctuation down into universal patterns across languages.
In spoken communication, pauses can be justified by human physiology, such as the need to catch one’s breath or to take a moment to structure what is to be said next in one’s mind. And in written communication?
“Creating a sentence by adding one word after another while ensuring that the message is clear and unambiguous is a bit like tightening the string of a bow: it is easy at first, but becomes more demanding with each passing moment. If there are no ordering elements in the text (and this is the role of punctuation), the difficulty of interpretation increases as the string of words lengthens. A bow that is too tight can break, and a sentence that is too long can become unintelligible. Therefore, the author is faced with the necessity of ‘freeing the arrow’, i.e. closing a passage of text with some sort of punctuation mark. This observation applies to all the languages analyzed, so we are dealing with what could be called a linguistic law,” states Dr. Tomasz Stanisz (IFJ PAN), first author of the article in question.
I like the analogy.
Also, I stumbled over this again. It looks handy and even has a couple of Steve’s books.