Dictée Punctuation Terms Request

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22 thoughts on “Dictée Punctuation Terms Request”

  1. Robert Harrell

    Okay, here’s the German

    Deutsche Interpunktion
    . Punkt
    , Komma
    : Doppelpunkt
    ; Semikolon
    ? Fragezeichen
    ! Ausrufezeichen
    „ öffnendes Anführungszeichen
    “ schließendes Anführungszeichen
    … Auslassungspunkte
    ´ Apostroph
    — Strich
    – Bindestrich
    ( öffnende Klammer
    ) schließende Klammer
    / Schrägstrich
    @ At-Zeichen (Klammeraffe, Affenschwanz)

    The official German name is “At-Zeichen” (at sign), but there are several colloquial terms. Two of them are “Klammeraffe” (spider monkey) or “Affenschwanz” (monkey’s tail).

  2. Danke, Robert! Du bist mir zuvorgekommen. 🙂

    To satisfy my own curiosity, is it the Austrian in me who wants to say “Beistrich” for Komma and “Anführungszeichen oben bzw. unten” for “öffnendes/schliessendes Anführungszeichen”?

  3. Has anyone ever seen an old clip of Victor Borga do a reading with phonetic punctuation? It is hilarious! I will have to find it on YouTube. I tried it in my class, but did not carry it all the way through. Next time…

  4. Signos de Punctuación en español:

    . (punto)
    , (coma)
    ; (punto y coma)
    : (dos puntos)
    ¿ (punto de interrogación invertido)
    ? (punto de interrogación)
    ¡ (punto de exclamación invertido)
    ! (punto de exclamación)
    « (comillas de apertura)
    » (comillas de cierre)
    … (puntos suspensivos)
    — la raya

      1. Ben,

        Please can you please add these to the original. I ‘ve never used them in my dictées but it can’t hurt:

        ‘ (Apostrophe)
        – (Trait d’union)
        _ ( Tiret)
        @ (Arobase)
        ( (Ouvrez les parenthèses)
        ) (Fermez les parenthèses)
        / ( Barre oblique ou slash)
        \ ( Barre oblique inversée ou antislash)

    1. Yeah, this is a bit of a problem. Here is what I found from the late David Morgans dictionary. It has some things, but not everything.

      03 PUNCTUATION
      03 accent (stress or pitch of a syllable) < accentus, ûs m. | (diacritical mark, diacritic) < accentûs signum (strictly, of mark indicating syllable stress or pitch) ? apex, icis m. ¶ QUINT. 1, 7, 2 et passim, of long mark over vowel. ¶ Vulg. Matt. 5, 18: "Iota unum aut unus apex non praeteribit a lege." ¶ 1672 FRISIUS v, of a book in which the Greek accents were negligently printed: "Si tamen Graeca quae passim occurrunt respicias, quot apices, tot fere menda reperias." ¶ EGGER L.D.I. 8. ? apiculus, i* m. ¶ LATHAM citing 16-c. source. ¶ RABELAIS 945: "(n medicorum libris … apiculus inversus aut praepostere scriptus multa hominum milia haud raro neci dedit."
      03 accent: accute accent accentus acûtus (DANTE Vulg. El. 345) | (diacritical mark) accentûs acûti signum
      03 accent: cedilla
      03 accent: circumflex accent accentus circumflexus (DANTE Vulg. El. 345) | (diacritical mark) accentûs circumflexi signum
      03 accent: grave accent accentus gravis; (diacritical mark) accentûs gravis signum
      03 accent: macron
      03 accent: macron: breve
      03 accent: tilde
      03 accent: umlaut, diaeresis
      03 breathing: rough breathing mark spiritûs asperi signum
      03 breathing: smooth breathing mark spiritûs lenis signum
      03 emoticon (series of characters – such as 🙂 – representing facial expression)
      03 emoticon: smiley (symbol representing smiling face) ôris renidentis imaguncula
      03 line: dotted line, broken line, sign on the dotted line
      03 logograms: "at" sign (@)
      03 logograms: ampersand (&)
      03 logograms: equal sign (=)
      03 logograms: plus sign (+)
      03 logograms: plus: minus sign (-)
      03 logograms: pound sign, number sign (#)
      03 marks: apostrophe
      03 marks: asterisk ? asteriscus, i m. ¶ SUET. frag. p. 139 (ed. Reifferscheid). HIER. Ep. 112, 19. ISID. Orig. 1, 20, 1. Ducange, defining as "nota instar stellulae quâ utuntur librarii." ? stellula, ae f. /
      03 marks: colon
      03 marks: colon: semicolon
      03 marks: comma ?? Virgula est vox ambigua; vide HIER. Ep. 112, 19: "ubicumque virgulae, hoc est obeli sunt."
      03 marks: dagger, obelus, obelisk ? obelus, i m. ¶ HIER. Ep. 112, 19: "Ubicumque virgulae, hoc est obeli sunt." Isid. 1810 BROWN viii: "signo obeli (†) notavi."
      03 marks: ellipsis points
      03 marks: exclamation point signum exclamationis (Pharm. Austr. xxii)
      03 marks: hyphen
      03 marks: hyphen: dash
      03 marks: obelus (indicating suspect passage in text) obelus, i m. (HIER. Ep. 112, 19; ISID. Orig. 1, 20, 1)
      03 marks: period (US), full stop (Br.) punctum, i n.
      03 marks: question mark
      03 marks: quotation marks
      03 marks: slash /
      03 marks: slash: backslash \
      03 marks: slash: vertical bar
      03 parentheses ( ) ? lunulae, arum f. pl. ¶ Erasmus. ? unci, orum m. pl. ¶ 1810 BROWN vi: "litterâ … uncis inclusâ."
      03 parentheses: brackets [ ]
      03 parentheses: brackets { }
      03 parentheses: brackets ?
      03 puncutation interpunctiones verborum (CIC. Mur. 25)
      03 type: bold, boldface
      03 type: italics obliqui typi m. pl. (Pharm. Austr. xxii)
      03 type: underline, underlining

      1. Hodgman says that while Donatus (fl. A.D. 354) in his Ars grammatica mentions punctuation that foreshadows our commas and periods, such punctuation marks were completely unknown in the Classical period. This doesn’t mean that Romans lacked mental and linguistic constructs that allowed them to see the pauses in a sentence. It’s just that they marked clauses and whatnot with vocabulary or word placement. For example, the enclitic -que ‘and’ is like a comma before the word to which the enclitic is attached. Ita, and sic ‘so, thus’ are like colons. Questions are indicated near the beginning of the sentence with question words instead of our terminal question marks. The possessive apostrophe that we may be en route to eliminating is marked in Latin by the genitive case. For quotation marks, Latin can use forms of the verb inquam. Emphasis or italics in Latin are shown by abnormal positions of the words.

        1. As I understand it, there really aren’t too many words for punctuation marks beyond period (punctum). I simply copied and pasted the entry from the David Morgans dictionary. The article gives us some idea how Latin punctuated itself. Now the question is what do we do.

          1. And how about “signum exclamationis” for exclamation point (!)? I am just thinking out loud here…

            But signum ______ might give us stuff for the marks besides “punctum” and “comma”.

  5. Hi, I wish I could do more for Chinese – I’ll add the ones I know. Another problem: when I’ve tried to type Chinese here (and there are different appearances for some punctuation so it needs to be typed in Chinese) the blog can’t handle it. It comes out scrambled. Let’s see if it does just for punctuation and not only for the characters:
    ??? ju4 hao4 “period”
    ??? dun4 hao4 “back-sloping or listing comma”
    ??? dou4 hao4 “comma”
    ??? wen4 hao4 “question mark”

    A couple asides: last summer while studying in China, my teacher did some handwritten dictation with us. The other Americans in the class (Chinese teachers, all of us) protested so much after a couple classes that she stopped. Handwriting in Chinese is a separate skill from reading or typing well. Yet by the end of July, I have to take an ACTFL Writing Proficiency Test for a Wisconsin certification course I’m in. Chinese requires handwritten essay answers. Almost all other languages offer a computerized, typed test. Tell me it’s not intentionally weeding out many Chinese learners who generally use a computer. (Even Chinese friends say it’s a growing problem for them to hand-write.)

    1. Sounds fine to me. My teacher over the summer only needed to say the 2 kinds of comma, period, and question mark for our dictation.

      I actually think that for Chinese, dictee could be done both as a typed and then again as a handwritten version of the same content. Tamula’s process for dictee is like that – she has them write the pinyin version and then the character version.

        1. Hm, you mean like how to say the names of the tones? (Ex: “2nd tone”)

          I would guess that teachers who want students to write out pinyin for dictee would want the kids to hear the tone without being told for each syllable. Well, at least after a few weeks. Someone who teaches high school should say — it’s different from my need because I have such young students. My beginners are only 9 or 10 years old, and that kind of dictee from the beginning of their time with Chinese I don’t think would work. I do dictation every so often with kids in years 2, 3, and 4.

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