1. There is perhaps some weight in the "argument" that Telugu doesn't
need punctuation marks, as has been pointed out by Sri Sreenivas
Paruchuri. I would add that English NEEDS punctuation marks, as in
"The man, whom we had seen speaking at the meeting the other day, is
the Education Minister." It does seem, however, that the reason why
Telugu "doesn't need" punctuation as badly as does English might not
be the "expressive power" of the language. What I mean is, one would
translate the above example English sentence as something like, "manam
aa rOju sabhalO okaayana maaTlaaDaDam chooSaamu kadaa. atanu vidyaa Saakha
mantriTa." The punctuation in this sentence is perhaps superfluous,
because of the way it is broken up into two sentences. A somewhat
more literal translation, "manam aa rOju evarinaitae sabhalO
maTlaaDaDam chooSaamO, aayana ...", generally sounds awkward in
Telugu. So my hunch is it is perhaps not the expressive power of
Telugu, but the need to break sentences up (so as to make them not
sound awkward) might be the reason why Telugu can work without punctuation.
2. Actually, there is another theory/hypothesis one could propose,
which directly contradicts what I said above. (Let me be my worst
critic, what the heck!) Languages are often classified as SOV
languages, SVO languages, etc. The S, O and V stand for Subject,
Object and Verb, or rather their relative order in normal assertive
sentences. English is an SVO language because in most normal English
sentences the subject comes first, followed by the verb and then the
object, e.g., "The girl ate the apple." Telugu is, as it turns out,
an SOV language, e.g., "aa ammaayi apilu tindi" (although one very
nice feature of Telugu grammatical structure is that the word order is
essentially free; SOV is the commonly preferred order). I wonder if
the relative lack of dependence on punctuation has something to do with
the SOV order in Telugu (or even the flexibility that stems from the
free word order).
Any comments?
Actually all Indian languages that I have ever been exposed to (e.g.,
Telugu, Hindi, Oriya, Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, etc.) are SOV
languages, as are some other Asian languages, e.g., Japanese.
(More on the connection between Telugu and Japanese later...)
--- Venu Dasigi
(dasigi@shu.sacredheart.edu)