Victor Borge would have loved this!

I'm sure many readers are familiar with the late Victor Borge and his 'phonetic punctuation'. In case you're not, here's an example.

Mr. Borge would doubtless be delighted to learn of changes in the way we punctuate our language - not to mention many innovative punctuation marks. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Internet culture generally favors a lighter, more informal style of punctuation. True, emoticons have sprung up to convey nuances of mood and tone. Moreover, typing makes it easy to amplify punctuation: splattering 20 exclamation marks on a page, or using multiple question marks to signify theatrical incredulity. But, overall, punctuation is being renounced.

How might punctuation now evolve? The dystopian view is that it will vanish. I find this conceivable, though not likely. But we can see harbingers of such change: editorial austerity with commas, the newsroom preference for the period over all other marks, and the taste for visual crispness.

Though it is not unusual to hear calls for new punctuation, the marks proposed tend to cannibalize existing ones. In this vein, you may have encountered the interrobang, which signals excited disbelief.

The Interrobang

Such marks are symptoms of an increasing tendency to punctuate for rhetorical rather than grammatical effect. Instead of presenting syntactical and logical relationships, punctuation reproduces the patterns of speech.

There's more at the link.

A range of little-known punctuation marks, some old, some relatively new, may be found here. From that second article, can you identify the punctuation marks shown below?




I wonder how Mr. Borge would pronounce those?





Peter