Punctuation

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In addition to letters, the Shwa script includes punctuation. Like English punctuation, Shwa punctuation comes after the phrase it commands.

Space (Dot)

As in most languages, Shwa uses a space to separate words. In Abjad gait, a Space also interrupts the cursive stroke linking all the consonants. In all gaits, the space is only as wide as a letter, so it's as wide as half a kana in Abugida gait and one-third of a character in Syllabary gait.

Shwa uses a small dot (·) to make a space visible - the dot is the visible form of the space . You can use it if your handwriting is sloppy.

The Shwa space is encoded (at #F080) separately from the normal Unicode space (at #0020). The rule is that the space between Shwa text and other text is the normal space, but the Shwa space is used within Shwa text. That permits fonts to show the dot when appropriate, and confounds the non-Shwa end-of-line algorithms so that lines of Shwa text are right-justified.

Two spaces are used between paragraphs, although they are displayed as two newlines. Shwa fonts are fixed-width, and the glyphs are designed to be be of equal width (monospace). You don't need to break a line at the end of a word or to indicate a word that is split between lines with a hyphen ; just write letters all the way to the end of the line and then write the next letter on a new line. At the end of a paragraph, the current line is truncated, a blank line is inserted, and the new paragraph starts at the left, without any indentation. This means that lines of Shwa text are always both left- and right-justified, and "soft" newlines are not embedded in the text.

In Shwa, we just use a space, not an apostrophe, when there is elision between words, as in French or Catalan.

We also use the Space in contractions :

Sometimes, you'll see a whole series of elisions, liaisons and contractions. In the following example from French, the original ne i ã a ends up pronounced nya na :

However, when two words combine to form one new word, they're written without spaces. That's true of words like des dels degli from French, Catalan and Italian :

Spacing

We mentioned on the Principles page that spacing is left to the font designer, but there are some basic ideas that are common to all Shwa fonts. Shwa is written on a grid whose cell size corresponds to the size of a Shwa vowel - tall letters are twice as tall, and fill a domino (a 2x1 rectangle). It's the height of this domino that is the named size of the font; for example, a 12-point font will have cells 6 points x 6 points.

But the letters don't completely fill the cell or domino : there is spacing around them (like CSS margin). Each glyph includes half the letter spacing that separates it from the adjacent glyph, so that adjacent letters are in adjacent cells. There is twice as much spacing at top and bottom of each domino, since the letter is centered. Here's a diagram :

The black grid shows the borders between cells, and the gray grid shows the centers of cells. But vowels aren't centered in their cell ; they always sit or hang on the center line.

Other gaits work the same way. In Abugida gait, the kana fill 2x2 cells, with double spacing all around. In Syllabary gait, the characters fill 3x3 cells, with triple spacing all around. (And the third row of Syllabary text usually hangs below text in the other gaits.) But as mentioned above, the space between words is always one cell wide, and the space between lines of text is always one cell tall.

Kerning

When a letter with an empty or almost-empty top is next to a letter with an empty or almost-empty bottom, there is an unusually large space between the two letters, and the eye has a harder time reading the word as a unit. This happens, for example, when a high vowel follows a semivowel whose stem is on the left, as in the word Shwa.

It's a common problem in most scripts, and the solution is called kerning : squeezing the two letters closer together when they fit. To kern the word Shwa, we slide the w a little to the right, and the high a a little bit to the left to fit into the w. The two letters still take up two columns on the grid, but the spacing has been redistributed a little.

If a letter wants to kern in both directions, it stays put (but the others kern).

But a Break or a Long Mark holds adjacent letters so they don't kern away.

Intonation

In all gaits, we also use a system of punctuation marks based on the accents. The three accents, both high and low, are used without any vowels to indicate punctuation within a sentence, the roles played by commas, colons, quotes and parentheses. Shwa also uses doubled versions of the three accents to indicate punctuation at the end of sentences, the roles played by periods, question marks and exclamation points. These punctuation marks count as words - they have spaces before and after them. Here's how they work:

In all the languages of the world, longer utterances are broken up into tone groups, to take a breath or to give the listener a chance to organize the incoming information. The breaks between tone groups also break up the rhythm of the words, and there is often a characteristic intonation for the tone group. Breaks between tone groups usually line up with syntactic breaks between sentences, clauses or phrases, and the intonation also tells the listener what kind of clause this is. For example, in English, we use characteristic intonations to mark queries, requests, exclamations, unexpected contrasts, doubt or certainty, and whether we're finished speaking or there's more to come.

But the actual intonations used for these roles not only vary between languages, they also vary within a language : between dialects, registers or even individual speakers. So in contrast to the rest of the Shwa script, the Shwa punctuation marks are used to indicate meaning, not sound. Said another way, Shwa punctuation, like punctuation in all languages, represents the underlying roles of constituents, not their phonetic realization.

However, there is still a relationship to the spoken phrase: Shwa punctuation marks are always and only placed at the end of tone groups. The presence of a punctuation mark indicates the end of a tone group, and the type of punctuation mark indicates the role of the tone group, but it doesn't indicate the actual phonetic intonation.

Sentence Punctuation

The end of a sentence is almost always the end of a tone group, and it's marked with a double punctuation mark :

• If the sentence is a query or request - the speaker expects a response - use a double Rising accent. This mark plays the role of the English question mark ?
• If the sentence is an imperative - Look out! - or an exclamation - My goodness! - use a double Falling accent. This mark plays the role of the English exclamation point !
• If the sentence is a normal statement, use a double Level accent. This mark plays the role of the English period .
• Mixed combinations are also possible to replace the interrobang, irony mark, etc.

Clause and Phrase Punctuation

Within a sentence, the punctuation mark used indicates the relationship of the tone group to what comes after it.

• If what follows is more of the same, use a low level accent, for instance to separate coordinate phrases, or items in a list.
  An Irishman a rabbi and a panda walked into a bar
• A high level accent is used like a colon, to introduce a subordinate phrase: a list or other explanation.
  I met my three traveling companions an Irishman a rabbi and a panda
• The low rising accent is used at the end of a subordinate phrase.
  With one hand tied behind my back I could still beat you at golf
  If you win the lottery would you buy a bigger house
  If I win the lottery I'd live on a tropical island
• The low falling accent is used at the beginning of a subordinate phrase.
  There he met Rayna who led him to the queen of the Gypsies
• Parenthetical and appositive phrases are delimited by a low falling accent beforehand and/or a low rising accent afterwards :
  There he met Rayna the Gypsy princess
  Then Rayna wearing a malicious grin and not much more led him to the queen of the Gypsies
• The high rising and falling accents, in that order, are used to set off a phrase to be considered as a single unit, for example a text, title or quote :
  Rayna intoned Bow to the Queen in a stern voice

Layouts

On the Principles page, I introduced the notion of 1D and 2D forms: the 1D form is the sequence, and the 2D form is how it's laid out on the page. I mentioned that different gaits share the same 1D form even when the 2D form is different. There's a similar distinction for blocks of text, as if text had different "gaits", but we call them layouts.

Printed text is usually in the dense layout. Each paragraph fills line after line, with line breaks and page breaks falling wherever they happen to fall. This paragraph is in dense layout except for the ragged right margin.

Text that is scrolled is usually in sparse layout. In this layout, each phrase or clause ending with a punctuation mark is on its own line, with the mark at the end of the line. The line is indented as needed so that dependent phrases and clauses are further to the right than their parents, no matter which comes first. This indentation don't appear in the text sequence at all - it's added by the display device.

"Scrolled" means that vertical space is doesn't cost anything, as is the case on a screen where you can scroll up and down. In those environments, using some of that free space to make the text clearer is worth doing. Of course, if it's the Home page of your web site and you want it to look just so, don't use the sparse layout. On the other hand, if it's the script of a screenplay, use sparse layout even if it's printed.

Here's an example of sparse text, in English:

And here's the same thing in Shwa:

You should find sparse layout easier to read.

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