European languaages do not have punctuation marks either, before the advent
of printing. There was no need for them. Punctuation marks are aids to
reading -
meant for people untrained in reading texts or for people
reading a text for the first time. Before the printing press, texts
were read ( which always meant reading aloud, there was no silent reading
before the printing press) to an audience by a trined reader-performer.
Such a person knew the text, its style of reading and all the "marks" of
punctuation and rendition by heart. Such a person did not need punctuation
marks on the text itself. In any case, the few punctuation marks that appear'
on a printed page now would have been wholly inadequate to cover the
range of vocal variations and styles of utterences needed for performing
the metrical text before the pre-printing days.
Printing press changed this picture. It made the text availabe to people toally
untrained to read it. Further more, it generated a new genre of writing, called
prose, closer to the ordinary sentece structure of spoken communication.
Reading such a thing was both easy and difficult. Easy because the nature of
the text did not require elaborate training in performance. Diffcicult
because, reading it for the first time was still open to ambiguities,
especially if
there is no way of predicting early enough in the progres of a sentence,
where to pause, and if it is a question an exclamtion or a statement.
Marks of punctuation were invented as way of making the printed texts
"user-friendly" to use a recent phrase.
Telugu, like many other Indian languages, was introduced to print much
later than Europe. Most print styles in Telugu were adopated from European
experience.
Thus the borrowing of punctation marks.
Even to day, our culture is still largely an oral cuture. We do not totally
depend upon the printed word for communication and education. Most people
know how to speak and read mostly by oral training in the family/community
before independently reading a printed book.We do not seem to depend on
punctuation marks as much as a wester-educated person is in reading a page.
we do not mind if an inerrogative senctence ends with a period and not with
a question mark. Often we do not even mind when a setence does not carry a
period at the end. Punctuation errors are not frowned upon as much as
errors in letters. In fact we do not have a coherent method of punctuation
for Telugu - our adaptation of English punctuation is haphazrd and
inadequate. But we still seem to read our book all right, at least we
pretend we do.
One explanation why we do not have Telugu book without printer's
errors is that we are not as badly hurt by them as for example a reader in
the western countries, where almost all their education has to come from a
printed book. But this is only an anthropological explantion. ( In fact
the other- sociological and political reasons are worth discussing: Why
do'not we have error-free printing in Telugu even after more than two
hundred years of history of priting? Why was it that books printed fifty
years ago were more carefully proof-read than books printed these days? Our
printing standars improved technologically, we have color printing offset
production, computerized typesetting and all those expensive things but the
accuracy of text has deteriorated so badly that even scholalry work by
university presses are published with shaby errors.)
In any case punctuation is a development of print culture. As for the
actual words for punctuation, we borrowed the words from English like we
did for motor car radio etc. There are a few pedantic translations too,
again like there are
for motor car and radio etc.