Danish Commas

From a mailing list comes a link to an article in Newsday that rips the lid off
a new European war that somehow has escaped
mainstream notice. It seems that the Danes are
feuding with themselves about the use and abuse of
commas:

The Conservatives prefer a return
to the system used from the 19th century until the
Second World War, when Danish was written according
to German rules of punctuation, which required
frequent commas, even in places where there seemed
to be no natural pause. A sentence would be
punctuated as follows: The man, I love, is a
dentist. The post-war atmosphere brought a distaste
for all things German, and in the emancipated 1960s
there arose an alternative method, with no rules, in
which commas were inserted to indicate pauses of
breath that occur in the natural rhythm of speech.

…In the general interest of progress, the
Culture Ministry recommended the New Comma as a
compromise, applying some grammatical rules to the
essentially physiological system that recorded
breaths. But in the years since, the comma debate
has only grown fiercer. Anarchistic writers and
teachers reject the New Comma as enslavement,
radical intellectuals embrace it as progressive;
politicians are on both sides; the Literary Academy
stays audibly silent; few people master the rules,
and everyone is confused.

That explains why, if you read them carefully,
Danish translators’ resumes, such as that of Sten
Hedegård Nielsen, say things such as: “…and I
am one of the very few who master both Danish comma
systems.”

The Danes could certainly learn a little
something from us Americans who have proudly
replaced those messy commas, semicolons, colons,
periods, parentheses and the occasional question
mark with the always-correct em dash —

Categories: Uncategorized dw