LC-678: paragraphs

Hi,

I mailed Chris Ridpath about his comment and he responded:
<quote>
I agree that it is a good idea to use the P element to group related 
sentences but I think that most writers already do this. I don't believe 
there is an accessibility problem that is addressed by this technique. Have 
you seen an example of a web page that does not use the P element and 
creates an accessibility problem?
</quote>

I have also been looking for languages that don't use the concept of 
paragraph (contacting several linguists and polyglots), and I found the 
following:

* "Classical Greek was writen in a continuous script with no breaks in an 
absolute sense: none for paragraphs, sentences, phrases, or words. In 
short, there was no punctuation whatsoever." 
(http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?3.61)

* Some writing systems were developed by people who were familiar with a 
European orthography. Literacy levels can influence the use of punctuation, 
paragraphs, etctera.

* Many written traditions did not start with prose but with other 
traditional forms, such as the epic or the hymn, where lines are grouped in 
a different manner, such as rhyming couplets or stanzas. Paragraphs are 
typical of "serious" prose writing (philosophical, historical etcetera). 
(See one of the comments at http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002448.php.)

* "The trend for all languages appears to be to use something we'd call 
paragraphs. But many only started using them in the past century, and one 
should be able to post documents in those pre-modern formats on the WWW." 
(Another comment at http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002448.php.) This 
statement seems to be confirmed by Wikipedia for Chinese and Japanese, 
where punctuation marks "only came into use relatively recently, the 
ancient forms of these languages having no punctuation at all. Traditional 
poetry and calligraphy maintains this punctuation-free style." 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#East_Asian_punctuation).

* "Classical Arabic never seemed to have paragraphs. Although, I'd have to 
say, Modern Standard Arabic uses paragraphs, but a lot of Arabic bloggers 
and religious writers/bloggers tend to ramble on for several pages in each 
post with absolutely no use of paragraphs, despite the ramblings being 
broken up logically." (Another comment at 
http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002448.php.)

* In languages that are in use today, poetry does not use paragraphs or 
sentences but lines and stanzas.

* For examples of orthographies without paragraphs, I was told to start 
with the less alphabetic scripts. Nakhi or Naxi divides the 'page' into 
small boxes that contain text (see the examples at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Frescoes_Baisha_11-25-2005_3-35-13_PM.jpg). 
In his "Dictionary of Languages",
Andrew Dalby also reproduces an example of the Nakhi/Naxi writing system 
and adds: "The poem is in five-syllable lines. A box of characters 
represents a sentence or sentence-unit,  (...)". However, it is not clear 
whether the thicker lines represent paragraphs.

* Paragraph may be defined as
   - a portion of text two markers for a subdivision of text
     (e.g. indentation, or specific characters or other written markers),
     i.e. what it looks like, or
   - a discourse structure containing a topic sentence, supporting
     sentences and a concluding sentence.
However, the latter does not seem to correspond well with Japanese 
"danraku" (usually translated as "paragraph") because danraku seem to have 
a different structure. (According to an article at 
http://www.jalt.org/pansig/2004/HTML/KimKon.htm, Japanese students of 
English use danraku-like structures when writing English essays; as a 
result, these essays are often considered to lack focus and be poorly 
organized by native speakers of English.)

Regards,

Christophe



-- 
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Departement of Electrical Engineering - Research Group on 
Document Architectures
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 - 3001 Leuven-Heverlee - BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/ 


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Received on Monday, 14 August 2006 16:44:13 UTC