雜誌精選》Let’s eat Grandma! 少個逗號意思大不同

雜誌精選》Let’s eat Grandma! 少個逗號意思大不同（示意圖/shutterstock達志影像）

中文有一句著名的無標點符號句子「下雨天留客天留我不留」，來自清朝趙恬養《增訂解人頤新集》中的著名故事，講述明朝才子徐文長有次外出訪友，巧遇梅雨季節，已經在友人家中待了好幾天不走，主人不方便開口趕人，因此故意寫紙條希望徐文長看了難爲情而自行告別。紙條上寫着「下雨天留客天留我不留」，原先意思是「下雨天留客；天留，我不留！」但沒想到因爲這句話沒有標點符號，反倒讓徐文長念成「下雨天，留客天；留我不？ 留！」給反將一軍。

與英文標點符號相關的故事也不少，像是Let's eat Grandma!（我們一起把奶奶吃掉！）跟Let's eat, Grandma!（奶奶，吃飯了！）差一個逗號，意思截然不同。

另一個誤用標點符號的著名笑話是「熊貓開槍」事件，據說有一本品質欠佳的百科全書介紹熊貓是Panda: large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves. 因爲逗號在eats跟shoots之間，意思變成「熊貓是大型黑白相間、外型像熊的哺乳動物，原產於中國。吃（eats）、射擊（shoots）、離開（leaves）」。但事實上正確寫法應該將最後一個逗號刪掉，成爲eats shoots and leaves，解釋爲「吃嫩芽（shoots）和葉子（leaves）」。

爲了展現對標點符號的重視，美國還特將9月24日訂爲National Punctuation Day「國家標點符號日」。事實上標點符號有其發展歷史，我們一起來閱讀以下幾個句子。

In the 3rd Century BCE, a librarian in Egypt named Aristophanes had had enough. He was chief of staff at the city's famous library, home to hundreds of thousands of scrolls, which were all frustratingly time-consuming to read. (公元前3世紀，埃及一位名叫Aristophanes的圖書館員已經受夠了。他是這座城市著名圖書館的館長，該圖書館藏書數十萬卷，閱讀起來相當費時，讓人倍感挫折。)

Back then the Greeks had written their texts so that their letters ran together“withnospacesorpunctuation”and without any distinction between lowercase and capitals. It was up to the reader to pick their way through this unforgiving mass of letters to discover where each word or sentence ended and the next began. (以前希臘人的字都寫在一起，中間沒有間隔，也無標點符號，甚至沒有大小寫區別。對於這些大量無情的文字，讀者需要自行判斷，仔細分辨每個單詞或句子的開頭和結尾。)

好在Aristophanes想出一種簡單的標點符號註釋方法，讓那些連在一起，不知頭尾在哪的希臘文字不再顯得冗長。

Aristophanes' breakthrough was to suggest that readers could annotate their documents, relieving the unbroken stream of text with dots of ink aligned with the middle (•), bottom (•) or top (•) of each line. His points corresponded to the pauses of increasing length that a practised reader would habitually insert between formal units of speech called the comma, colon and period. (Aristophanes的創舉在於讓讀者於文章中加上註釋，用墨水在每一行的中間、底部或頂部點上標記，讓那些連在一起的文字串不會那麼冗長難讀。他的點點跟一位熟練的讀者習慣性地在長句裡的正式語音單位間所插入的停頓相對應，亦稱之爲逗號、冒號和句號。)

Between 400 and 800 AD, as the Bible began to be mass-produced, punctuation was popularized along with it. In the 1400s, a huge shift came with the printing press, which spurred the need for a more unified punctuation system. (西元400到800年間，隨着聖經開始大量出版，標點符號也漸漸普及。在西元1400年代，更因爲印刷術的興起，激發了人們對於更統一的標點符號系統的需求。)

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