I enjoyed the discussion. I afraid a misreading of the situation crept into
our discussion. It is wrong to think Telugu does not NEED punctuation as
much as English does.There is nothing in the nature of Telugu, it's syntax
or accent patterns, that exempts the language from the requirements of
punctuation. All languages, to the extent they are to be read in print,
need punctuation and
Telugu is no exception.
Old texts in all languges did not need punctuation because the reader was
trained to read them without punctuational help. That sitution does not
continue in the age of print.
In other words, need of punctuation is not language-related. It is related
to the level of development of printed books.
Some one mentioned Kadambari in Sanskrit with its proverbially long
sentences, and the gadya sections in Telugu Bhagavata. As all old texts,
these texts do not have punctuation marks. But you should be trianed to
read them - in other words it's performer's job. The style of these books
is similar to speech, which does not need punctuation "marks".In speech,
your voice does the job of punctuating the sentences.
Telugu prose written in recent books and essays is in a state of confusion -
it is somewhere between a print style and speech style. In the absence of a
strong need for developing a standard language for intellectual
communication, Telugu is largely in the hands of creative writers. A large
part of Telugu publications in any given year are novels, short stories,
poems. Without a strong inellectual community to back it, Telugu does not
have much of a chance to develop a good modern written style with all the
needs of punctuation, word-spacing spelling- standardization properly taken
care of.
VNR