I was born into an eminent family,
affluent and wealthy,
endowed with a beautiful complexion and figure;
Majjha’s true-born daughter.
Bhante Sujato’s placement of the semi-colon reads more naturally in the English. But departs from the punctuation in the Pali text. So I’m wondering how much a translator sees the punctuation as part of the text, and how much he/she sees it as the addition of later editors–a guide to one way of understanding the text, but not part of the text itself.
The punctuation that you see has been added by modern editors. Manuscripts do have some punctuation, but less so that Roman texts. I am not really sure of how editors used the manuscript punctuations. In many cases the text would break on the same logical places.
Unicode records the following punctuation for Brahmi, which TBH I’m surprised how many there are. I’m not sure what all of them are used for. But Brahmi was in use for a long time, so I’d assume the uses vary:
𑁇 danda (bar)
𑁈 double danda
𑁉 “punctuation dot”
𑁊 “punctuation double dot”
𑁋 “puncuation line”
𑁌 “crescent bar”
𑁍 lotus: this is in fact the basis for SC’s logo
The Dutiyaparakkamabahu manuscript from the 14th century, written in early modern Sinhala script, uses ෴ (“kunddaliya”) to indicate elipsis, much like the modern …
The punctuation in the MS edition as you see here is purely conventional: all verses have the same pattern. I ignore the verse punctuation when translating and I’m sure any other translator does, too.
How was it determined that a semicolon should be placed in the Romanized Pali text? Were there punctuation marks in the ancient written languages that the Romanized text were translated from ?
As far as I know the only punctuation would have been end of sentences.
Since the Pali comes from an oral tradition, there would have been no sense of punctuation.
Sometimes the manuscripts will use apostrophes to indicate when a letter has been removed in a contraction. I think the semicolons were just put in by the folks who made the Romanized manuscripts.
Actually, perhaps the @moderators could merge this thread with an existing one on the same topic:
If it’s actually including the “pe”, then it probably means “fullstop pe fullstop”. That would make sense as a way of emphasizing the fact that it was an elision and that “pe” was an abbreviation. Like we have “…pe…” in the English.
