Читать книгу Anthology of Black Humor - André Breton - Страница 28

In addition to the alphabet of letters, we will have to create one for punctuation, which must contain the same number of signs. So little is known of punctuation that French has only seven signs for it; to wit , ; : . ! ? ). The bracket, which was the eighth, is no longer in use. As for accents (é, è, ê, ë), they belong to the various vowels and are not punctuation marks. It is the same for the apostrophe, which would require a mark of its own, rather than just a raised comma. Our language is so poor in this regard that we are obliged to use either the period or the colon, which causes confusion.

I had undertaken to write a work on the full range of punctuation, and had gotten as far as twenty-five marks, illustrated by examples that proved the ambiguity of our current marks: I lost this work before it was finished and I have not returned to it since. Let us note in this regard that the first of all marks, the lowest, called the comma, should be differentiated into at least four distinct marks, to allow us to appreciate its many meanings, its different and infinitely varied senses, which now are expressed by means of a single mark: this is the height of confusion. It is the same for the other marks: they accumulate three or four meanings. Civilized punctuation is in real chaos, much like spelling, which varies with every printer in Paris. The Academy, with its obscurantist principle of not allowing even the most blatant vices to be corrected, has alienated people’s minds to such a degree that it has resulted in widespread rebellion, a universal anarchy in grammar.

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—from The New Industrial and Societal World

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