In ancient times, reading must have been difficult without spaces and punctuation between words. Now we have periods, commas, and colons. There are hyphens, short dashes, and long dashes. To add to our confusion, we also have a squiggle to mark a question, a vertical mark for exclamation, and curly marks for dialogue.
What would we have if we were to pronounce those marks when reading aloud? Would we understand one another more clearly? Here’s one idea from Victor Borge’s “Phonetic Punctuation”:
The sounds become really fun when used in our songs.
