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65-779: Irk Bitig or Irq Bitig ( Old Turkic : 𐰃𐰺𐰴 𐰋𐰃𐱅𐰃𐰏 ‎ ), known as the Book of Omens or Book of Divination in English, is a 9th-century manuscript book on divination that was discovered in the "Library Cave" of the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang , China , by Aurel Stein in 1907, and is now in the collection of the British Library in London , England . The book is written in Old Turkic using

130-463: A punctus was placed at one of several heights to denote rhetorical divisions in speech: In addition, the Greeks used the paragraphos (or gamma ) to mark the beginning of sentences, marginal diples to mark quotations, and a koronis to indicate the end of major sections. During the 1st century BC, Romans also made occasional use of symbols to indicate pauses, but by the 4th century AD

195-455: A booklet comprising 58 folios folded in half, each page being about 13.1 × 8.1 cm in size. The pages of the booklet turn to the right (opposite to that of Western books), and the Old Turkic text is laid out in horizontal right-to-left lines running top-to-bottom down the page. The text of Irk Bitig consists of 104 pages in 52 folios (folios 5b–57a), with 40–70 characters per page. The text

260-507: A copy of an earlier text that was probably written in the Old Uyghur script . On the basis of its linguistic features, Marcel Erdal has dated the composition of the original work to the 8th and 9th centuries, among the earliest group of Old Turkic texts. According to Annemarie von Gabain (1901–1993) the Irk Bitig is written in a "Manichaean" dialect of Old Turkic, reflecting the fact that it

325-499: A four-sided dice made from a rectangular piece of wood that would be thrown three times (or three such dice thrown once) as part of the divination ceremony. The groups of circles are followed by a short explanation of their meaning, such as "I am a white-spotted falcon. I enjoy sitting on a sandal-wood tree" (no.4), "A man comes hurriedly. He comes bringing good tiding" (no.7), and "An old ox was eaten by ants, gnawing around its belly. It lays down without being able to move" (no.37). After

390-555: A nasal in a word such as 𐰢𐰤 ( men , "I"). There are approximately 12 case morphemes in Old Turkic (treating 3 types of accusatives as one); the table below lists Old Turkic cases following Marcel Erdal ’s classification (some phonemes of suffixes written in capital letters denote archiphonemes which sometimes are dropped or changed as per (East) Old Turkic phonotactics ): Old Turkic (like Modern Turkic) had 2 grammatical numbers: singular and plural. However, Old Turkic also formed collective nouns (a category related to plurals) by

455-473: A piece of written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet -based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization , no vowels (see abjad ), and with only a few punctuation marks, as it

520-458: A red circle as a word separation mark in order to indicate word boundaries. The main text of the book comprises 65 sections, each representing a particular divination, which is headed by three groups of between one and four circles filled with red ink. These three groups of circles are the omen ( ırk in Old Turkic) that are the subject of the divination, and are thought to represent the pips on

585-443: A separate suffix -(A)gU(n) e.g. tay agun uŋuz ‘your colts’. Unlike Modern Turkic, Old Turkic had 3 types of suffixes to denote plural: Suffixes except for -lAr is limitedly used for only a few words. In some descriptions, -(X)t and -An may also be treated as collective markers. -(X)t is used for titles of non-Turkic origin, e.g. tarxat ← tarxan 'free man' <Soghdian, tégit ← tégin 'prince' (of unknown origin). -s

650-400: A single character (-), sometimes repeated to represent a long dash. The spaces of different widths available to professional typesetters were generally replaced by a single full-character width space, with typefaces monospaced . In some cases a typewriter keyboard did not include an exclamation point (!), which could otherwise be constructed by the overstrike of an apostrophe and a period;

715-409: A thin space. In Canadian French , this is only the case for ⟨:⟩ . In Greek , the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point ⟨·⟩ , known as the ano teleia ( άνω τελεία ). In Georgian , three dots ⟨ ჻ ⟩ were formerly used as a sentence or paragraph divider. It

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780-472: Is a modern innovation; pre-modern Arabic did not use punctuation. Hebrew , which is also written from right to left, uses the same characters as in English, ⟨,⟩ and ⟨?⟩ . Originally, Sanskrit had no punctuation. In the 17th century, Sanskrit and Marathi , both written using Devanagari , started using the vertical bar ⟨ । ⟩ to end a line of prose and double vertical bars ⟨॥⟩ in verse. Punctuation

845-444: Is a similar suffix, e.g. ïšbara-s 'lords' <Sanskrit īśvara . -An is used for person, e.g. ärän 'men, warriors' ← är 'man', oglan ← ogul 'son'. Today, all Modern Turkic languages (except for Chuvash ) use exclusively the suffix of the -lAr type for plural. Finite verb forms in Old Turkic (i.e. verbs to which a tense suffix is added) always conjugate for person and number of the subject by corresponding suffixes save for

910-579: Is attested in a number of scripts, including the Old Turkic script , the Old Uyghur alphabet , the Brahmi script , and the Manichaean script . The Turkic runiform alphabet of Orkhon Turkic was deciphered by Vilhelm Thomsen in 1893. The Old Turkic script (also known variously as Göktürk script, Orkhon script, Orkhon-Yenisey script) is the alphabet used by the Göktürks and other early Turkic khanates during

975-530: Is not precisely dated, but its colophon states that it was written on the 15th day of the second month of the year of the tiger at the Taygüntan ( Chinese : 大雲堂 ; pinyin : Dàyúntáng ) Manichaean monastery by an anonymous monk for his "elder brother", General İtaçuk (Saŋun İtaçuk). As the Library Cave was sealed in the early 11th century, it is thought that this year of the tiger must be sometime during

1040-406: Is represented by a colon, and vice versa; the exclamation mark is represented by a diagonal similar to a tilde ⟨~⟩ , while the question mark ⟨՞⟩ resembles an unclosed circle placed after the last vowel of the word. Arabic , Urdu , and Persian —written from right to left—use a reversed question mark: ⟨؟⟩ , and a reversed comma: ⟨،⟩ . This

1105-500: Is still sometimes used in calligraphy. Spanish and Asturian (both of them Romance languages used in Spain ) use an inverted question mark ⟨ ¿ ⟩ at the beginning of a question and the normal question mark at the end, as well as an inverted exclamation mark ⟨ ¡ ⟩ at the beginning of an exclamation and the normal exclamation mark at the end. Armenian uses several punctuation marks of its own. The full stop

1170-445: Is the god of the road, who bestows his favour on travellers (no.2), and mends old things and brings order to the country (no.48). The title Khan also features in several omens, establishing a royal camp (no.28), coming back from a victorious battle (no.34), and going hunting (no.63), which are all good omens. Omen 63 mentions the custom of the khan killing an animal with his own hands after it has been surrounded by his retinue. After

1235-524: Is written in black ink with red punctuation marks marking word division, except for the colophon on the last two pages, which is written in red ink. The first four and a half folios (including one line overwriting the start of the Old Turkic text) and the last three folios (of which one and a half folios overwrite the Old Turkic colophon) are Buddhist devotional verses written in Chinese . As the Chinese text overwrites

1300-600: The punctus , a comma-shaped mark, and a 7-shaped mark ( comma positura ), often used in combination. The same marks could be used in the margin to mark off quotations. In the late 8th century a different system emerged in France under the Carolingian dynasty . Originally indicating how the voice should be modulated when chanting the liturgy , the positurae migrated into any text meant to be read aloud, and then to all manuscripts. Positurae first reached England in

1365-494: The Bible started to be produced. These were designed to be read aloud, so the copyists began to introduce a range of marks to aid the reader, including indentation , various punctuation marks ( diple , paragraphos , simplex ductus ), and an early version of initial capitals ( litterae notabiliores ). Jerome and his colleagues, who made a translation of the Bible into Latin ,

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1430-627: The Indian subcontinent , ⟨ :- ⟩ is sometimes used in place of colon or after a subheading. Its origin is unclear, but could be a remnant of the British Raj . Another punctuation common in the Indian Subcontinent for writing monetary amounts is the use of ⟨/-⟩ or ⟨/=⟩ after the number. For example, Rs. 20/- or Rs. 20/= implies 20 whole rupees. Thai , Khmer , Lao and Burmese did not use punctuation until

1495-526: The Old Turkic script (also known as "Orkhon" or "Turkic runes"); it is the only known complete manuscript text written in the Old Turkic script. It is also an important source for early Turkic mythology . The only extant version of the Irk Bitig is a manuscript from the Dunhuang Library Cave that is now held at the British Library ( shelfmark Or.8212/161 ). The manuscript is in the form of

1560-641: The Talas Valley of Turkestan and the Old Hungarian alphabet of the 10th century. Words were usually written from right to left. Variants of the script were found in Mongolia and Xinjiang in the east and the Balkans in the west. The preserved inscriptions were dated between the 8th and 10th centuries. Vowel roundness is assimilated through the word through vowel harmony . Some vowels were considered to occur only in

1625-622: The Vulgate ( c.  AD 400 ), employed a layout system based on established practices for teaching the speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero . Under his layout per cola et commata every sense-unit was indented and given its own line. This layout was solely used for biblical manuscripts during the 5th–9th centuries but was abandoned in favor of punctuation. In the 7th–8th centuries Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes, whose native languages were not derived from Latin , added more visual cues to render texts more intelligible. Irish scribes introduced

1690-595: The at sign (@) has gone from an obscure character mostly used by sellers of bulk commodities (10 pounds @$ 2.00 per pound), to a very common character in common use for both technical routing and an abbreviation for "at". The tilde (~), in moveable type only used in combination with vowels, for mechanical reasons ended up as a separate key on mechanical typewriters , and like @ it has been put to completely new uses. There are two major styles of punctuation in English: British or American. These two styles differ mainly in

1755-506: The front vowel forms of the letter s 𐰾 ‎ and n 𐰤 ‎ in certain situations where a back vowel form of the letters would be expected. The manuscript also uses two signs, 𐱇 ‎ (used to write the word ot meaning "grass") and 𐰰 ‎ (used to represent a syllabic up or the letter p after the letter u ), that are not attested in other manuscript texts or inscriptions. The Old Turkic text does not have any sentence punctuation , but uses two black lines in

1820-557: The semicolon , making occasional use of parentheses , and creating the modern comma by lowering the virgule. By 1566, Aldus Manutius the Younger was able to state that the main object of punctuation was the clarification of syntax . By the 19th century, punctuation in the Western world had evolved "to classify the marks hierarchically, in terms of weight". Cecil Hartley's poem identifies their relative values: The stop point out, with truth,

1885-537: The 12th century scribes also began entering diples (sometimes double) within the column of text. The amount of printed material and its readership began to increase after the invention of moveable type in Europe in the 1450s. Martin Luther 's German Bible translation was one of the first mass printed works, he used only virgule , full stop and less than one percent question marks as punctuation. The focus of punctuation still

1950-592: The 1960s, it failed to achieve widespread use. Nevertheless, it and its inverted form were given code points in Unicode: U+203D ‽ INTERROBANG , U+2E18 ⸘ INVERTED INTERROBANG . The six additional punctuation marks proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin in his book Plumons l'Oiseau ("Let's pluck the bird", 1966) could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis . These were: An international patent application

2015-408: The 3rd person, in which case person suffix is absent. This grammatical configuration is preserved in the majority of Modern Turkic languages, except for some such as Yellow Uyghur in which verbs no longer agree with the person of the subject. Old Turkic had a complex system of tenses, which could be divided into six simple and derived tenses, the latter formed by adding special (auxiliary) verbs to

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2080-577: The 8th to 10th centuries to record the Old Turkic language. The script is named after the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia where early 8th-century inscriptions were discovered in an 1889 expedition by Nikolai Yadrintsev . This writing system was later used within the Uyghur Khaganate . Additionally, a Yenisei variant is known from 9th-century Yenisei Kirghiz inscriptions, and it has likely cousins in

2145-410: The 9th or 10th centuries. Louis Bazin suggests that the year of the tiger could here be 930 or 942, but Gerard Clauson and Talat Tekin both date the manuscript to the 9th century (i.e. one of the years 810, 822, 834, 846, 858, 870, 882 or 894). A number of transcription errors and textual omissions have been identified in the manuscript text, which suggest that it is not an original composition but

2210-555: The French author Hervé Bazin , could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis . In rare cases, the meaning of a text can be changed substantially by using different punctuation, such as in "woman, without her man, is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of men to women), contrasted with "woman: without her, man is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of women to men). Similar changes in meaning can be achieved in spoken forms of most languages by using elements of speech such as suprasegmentals . The rules of punctuation vary with

2275-499: The Greek théseis —called distinctiones in Latin —prevailed, as reported by Aelius Donatus and Isidore of Seville (7th century). Latin texts were sometimes laid out per capitula , where each sentence was placed on its own line. Diples were used, but by the late period these often degenerated into comma-shaped marks. Punctuation developed dramatically when large numbers of copies of

2340-454: The West wrote in scriptio continua , i.e. without punctuation delimiting word boundaries . Around the 5th century BC, the Greeks began using punctuation consisting of vertically arranged dots—usually a dicolon or tricolon—as an aid in the oral delivery of texts. After 200 BC, Greek scribes adopted the théseis system invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium , where a single dot called

2405-400: The adoption of punctuation from the West in the 20th century. Blank spaces are more frequent than full stops or commas. In 1962, American advertising executive Martin K. Speckter proposed the interrobang (‽), a combination of the question mark and exclamation point, to mark rhetorical questions or questions stated in a tone of disbelief. Although the new punctuation mark was widely discussed in

2470-492: The beginning and end of the Old Turkic text, it is believed that the text of Irk Bitig was written first, and that the blank pages at the start and end of the booklet were later filled with the Chinese Buddhist verses. The title by which the book is known, Irk Bitig , meaning "Book of Omens", is given at the bottom of the last page of the main text (folio 55b), but the author is not mentioned anywhere. The manuscript text

2535-570: The closing quotation mark regardless. This rule varies for other punctuation marks; for example, American English follows the British English rule when it comes to semicolons, colons, question marks, and exclamation points. The serial comma is used much more often in the United States than in the UK. Other languages of Europe use much the same punctuation as English. The similarity is so strong that

2600-476: The colon, and the full point terminating the sentence. The marks of interrogation and admiration were introduced many years after. The introduction of electrical telegraphy with a limited set of transmission codes and typewriters with a limited set of keys influenced punctuation subtly. For example, curved quotes and apostrophes were all collapsed into two characters (' and "). The hyphen , minus sign , and dashes of various widths have been collapsed into

2665-515: The explanation is a prognostication in the form "Know thus, it is ..." "good" (33 times), "very good" (7 times), "bad" (17 times) or "very bad" (2 times). In a few cases the prognostication after "know thus" is missing. There are 64 combinations of three groups of one to four pips, but the book gives a total of sixty-five omens, with some errors, including two missing omens (3-1-1 and 1-2-4) and some duplicate omens (3-4-1 occurs three times, and 3-1-3 occurs twice). The omens comprise short stories about

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2730-580: The few variations may confuse a native English reader. Quotation marks are particularly variable across European languages. For example, in French and Russian , quotes would appear as: « Je suis fatigué. » (In French, the quotation marks are spaced from the enclosed material; in Russian they are not.) In the French of France and Belgium , the marks ⟨:⟩ , ⟨;⟩ , ⟨?⟩ and ⟨!⟩ are preceded by

2795-405: The final divination, the book concludes, "Now, my dear sons, know thus: this book of divination is good. Thus everyone is master of his own fate." The divination text is written in a mix of prose and poetry, and although it does not have a fixed poetic metre , it does exhibit poetic features such as stylistic parallelism , alliteration and rhyme . Old Turkic language East Old Turkic

2860-491: The greater use and finally standardization of punctuation, which showed the relationships of words with each other: where one sentence ends and another begins, for example. The introduction of a standard system of punctuation has also been attributed to the Venetian printers Aldus Manutius and his grandson. They have been credited with popularizing the practice of ending sentences with the colon or full stop (period), inventing

2925-413: The guidance of the reader produced the colon and full point. In process of time, the comma was added, which was then merely a perpendicular line, proportioned to the body of the letter. These three points were the only ones used until the close of the fifteenth century, when Aldo Manuccio gave a better shape to the comma, and added the semicolon; the comma denoting the shortest pause, the semicolon next, then

2990-707: The initial syllable, but they were later found to be in suffixes. Length is distinctive for all vowels; while most of its daughter languages have lost the distinction, many of these preserve it in the case of /e/ with a height distinction, where the long phoneme developed into a more closed vowel than the short counterpart. Old Turkic is highly restrictive in which consonants words can begin with: words can begin with /b/, /t/, /tʃ/, /k/, /q/, /s/, /ɫ/ and /j/, but they do not usually begin with /p/, /d/, /g/, /ɢ/, /l/, /ɾ/, /n/, /ɲ/, /ŋ/, /m/, /ʃ/, or /z/. The only exceptions are 𐰤𐰀 ( ne , "what, which") and its derivatives, and some early assimilations of word-initial /b/ to /m/ preceding

3055-402: The language, location , register , and time . In online chat and text messages punctuation is used tachygraphically , especially among younger users. Punctuation marks, especially spacing , were not needed in logographic or syllabic (such as Chinese and Mayan script ) texts because disambiguation and emphasis could be communicated by employing a separate written form distinct from

3120-518: The late 10th century, probably during the Benedictine reform movement, but was not adopted until after the Norman conquest . The original positurae were the punctus , punctus elevatus , punctus versus , and punctus interrogativus , but a fifth symbol, the punctus flexus , was added in the 10th century to indicate a pause of a value between the punctus and punctus elevatus . In

3185-485: The late 11th/early 12th century the punctus versus disappeared and was taken over by the simple punctus (now with two distinct values). The late Middle Ages saw the addition of the virgula suspensiva (slash or slash with a midpoint dot) which was often used in conjunction with the punctus for different types of pauses. Direct quotations were marked with marginal diples, as in Antiquity, but from at least

3250-502: The original Morse code did not have an exclamation point. These simplifications have been carried forward into digital writing, with teleprinters and the ASCII character set essentially supporting the same characters as typewriters. Treatment of whitespace in HTML discouraged the practice (in English prose) of putting two full spaces after a full stop, since a single or double space would appear

3315-498: The other hand, animals giving birth are good omens (nos. 5 and 41). A couple of the omens show a threefold pattern of parallelism between two animals and a human: a white mare, a she-camel and a princess give birth (no. 5); young birds, fawns, and children get lost in the fog (no.15). The Sky God Tengri is featured in some of the omens (no.12, 15, 17, 38, 41, 47, 54, 60), and he is normally shown to be benign, for instance rescuing lost or exhausted animals (nos. 15 and 17). Also featured

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3380-412: The practice of word separation . Likewise, insular scribes adopted the distinctiones system while adapting it for minuscule script (so as to be more prominent) by using not differing height but rather a differing number of marks—aligned horizontally (or sometimes triangularly)—to signify a pause's duration: one mark for a minor pause, two for a medium one, and three for a major one. Most common were

3445-489: The punctuation of traditional typesetting, writing forms like text messages tend to use the simplified ASCII style of punctuation, with the addition of new non-text characters like emoji . Informal text speak tends to drop punctuation when not needed, including some ways that would be considered errors in more formal writing. In the computer era, punctuation characters were recycled for use in programming languages and URLs . Due to its use in email and Twitter handles,

3510-411: The same on the screen. (Most style guides now discourage double spaces, and some electronic writing tools, including Misplaced Pages's software, automatically collapse double spaces to single.) The full traditional set of typesetting tools became available with the advent of desktop publishing and more sophisticated word processors . Despite the widespread adoption of character sets like Unicode that support

3575-454: The simple tenses. Some suffixes are attested as being attached to only one word and no other instance of attachment is to be found. Similarly, some words are attested only once in the entire extant Old Turkic corpus. The following have been classified by Gerard Clauson as denominal noun suffixes. The following have been classified by Gerard Clauson as deverbal suffixes. Punctuation Punctuation marks are marks indicating how

3640-472: The spoken form of the language. Ancient Chinese classical texts were transmitted without punctuation. However, many Warring States period bamboo texts contain the symbols ⟨└⟩ and ⟨▄⟩ indicating the end of a chapter and full stop , respectively. By the Song dynasty , the addition of punctuation to texts by scholars to aid comprehension became common. During antiquity, most scribes in

3705-403: The time of pause A sentence doth require at ev'ry clause. At ev'ry comma, stop while one you count; At semicolon, two is the amount; A colon doth require the time of three ; The period four , as learned men agree. The use of punctuation was not standardised until after the invention of printing. According to the 1885 edition of The American Printer , the importance of punctuation

3770-412: The way in which they handle quotation marks, particularly in conjunction with other punctuation marks. In British English, punctuation marks such as full stops and commas are placed inside the quotation mark only if they are part of what is being quoted, and placed outside the closing quotation mark if part of the containing sentence. In American English, however, such punctuation is generally placed inside

3835-429: The world in which the nomadic Turkic people lived. Animals feature prominently in most of the omens, sometimes domesticated animals such as horse and camels, and sometimes wild animals such as tigers and deer. When wild animals fight each other or are injured the omen is bad (nos.6, 8, 37, 43, 44, 45, 46, and 61). Likewise, when domestic animals are mistreated, sick or stolen the omen is bad (nos. 16, 25, 39, 50, and 65). On

3900-443: Was filed, and published in 1992 under World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) number WO9219458, for two new punctuation marks: the "question comma" and the "exclamation comma". The question comma has a comma instead of the dot at the bottom of a question mark, while the exclamation comma has a comma in place of the point at the bottom of an exclamation mark. These were intended for use as question and exclamation marks within

3965-441: Was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights (such as Euripides and Aristophanes ) did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes space between words and both obsolete and modern signs. By the 19th century, the punctuation marks were used hierarchically, according to their weight. Six marks, proposed in 1966 by

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4030-474: Was not used in Chinese , Japanese , Korean and Vietnamese Chu Nom writing until the adoption of punctuation from the West in the late 19th and early 20th century. In unpunctuated texts, the grammatical structure of sentences in classical writing is inferred from context. Most punctuation marks in modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have similar functions to their English counterparts; however, they often look different and have different customary rules. In

4095-488: Was noted in various sayings by children, such as: Charles the First walked and talked Half an hour after his head was cut off . With a semicolon and a comma added, it reads as follows: Charles the First walked and talked; Half an hour after, his head was cut off. In a 19th-century manual of typography , Thomas MacKellar writes: Shortly after the invention of printing, the necessity of stops or pauses in sentences for

4160-414: Was rhetorical, to aid reading aloud. As explained by writer and editor Lynne Truss , "The rise of printing in the 14th and 15th centuries meant that a standard system of punctuation was urgently required." Printed books, whose letters were uniform, could be read much more rapidly than manuscripts. Rapid reading, or reading aloud, did not allow time to analyze sentence structures. This increased speed led to

4225-413: Was written at a Manichaean monastery, but Clauson has noted that the language of this text is virtually identical to that of the corpus of secular inscriptions in the Old Turkic script from the Orkhon Valley , and so "Manichaean" is not a valid linguistic term. The British Library manuscript exhibits a number of orthographic peculiarities that may reflect the dialect of its scribe. In particular, it uses

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