Responding to my father on Facebook, I quoted my wife and when it came time to punctuate the sentence, I paused.
My parents are going to look for a Halloween costume in the States and send it to us. The asked what kind we would like. My wife replied “A cute one” but when typing it on Facebook, no punctuation seemed to match the way it had been said.
A period felt a little too command like. An exclamation mark, however, felt like it was conveying more excitement than intended. I needed punctuation that hit about halfway between the power that a period and exclamation mark give.
Now, it could be said that from context, it would be understood that my wife was neither issuing a command nor way too excited about this. But what if one of those was the reality? In that case, more words would have to be used. This of course is not an issue at face value, but it changes the words used which could then imply other meanings, right?
As text has been used in difgferent ways over the years, we as people have been finding different ways to use it to represent the variety of tones in languages. Caps lock, short hand, smilie faces, all of these things have an impact on how our written word is understood. However, we have not really started using different punctuation on the keyboard as sentence delimiters.
Even if we did, it would take time for things to catch on and then not everyone would use it the same way.
When I first came to Japan, I emailed someone several times to ask how to get to a location for a party. Their last email ended with “…” which, to me, signified a bit of annoyance for all my emailing. But when I talked to the directly about it, they said that was not the case at all.
That very “…” often shows up in video games (Japanese RPGs) and was a joke amongst my friends and I in college. “Dot, dot, dot” is how we would read it, but we just assumed it was meant to indicate silence. Which didn’t particularly make sense, but we just kind of went with it.
Flash forward to me playing some Japanese sound novels and every time “…” showed up there would be a sigh, or a grunt or some sort of exhalation. The key was that it was not silence, and I had never realized this. That punctuation had more meaning than I was giving it.
Which is why the voice acting that is now more prevalent in video games helps to get the text across to the player. But we still will lack this in our own text messages, doing our best not to cause confusion or be misunderstood.
Back at TGS 2008 when I played Demon’s Souls I was the only one in my group who left the demo booth unimpressed. I had picked the mage and didn’t quite care for how it controlled. I also managed to die so many times that the Lady of the Booth came over and started giving me tips on how not to be so awful at the game.
