Are there any languages that punctuate mood?
Much mood is linguistically encoded in language. e.g.The admirative mood is used to express surprise, but also doubt, irony, sarcasm, etc. In Indo-European languages, the admirative, unlike the optative, is not one of the original moods, but a later development. Admirative constructs occur in Balkan Slavic (Bulgarian and Macedonian), Albanian, Megleno-Romanian and Ukrainian Tosk Albanian. A form of the admirative, derived from the Albanian pattern, can be found in Frasheriote Arumanian. It seems that the dubitative/inferential patterns of Turkish – a non-Indo-European language – influenced Albanian and Balkan Slavic languages in this regard. The admirative carries evidential value. Writing on the typology of evidentiality in Balkan languages, Victor Friedman says: “As grammaticalized in the Balkan languages, evidentiality encodes the speaker’s evaluation of the narrated event, often, but not always, predicated upon the nature
The use of mood punctuation seems an inevitable byproduct of the use of written language for chat programs, etc.: the most direct analog to an online chat is a face-to-face conversation, which leaves the absence of the emotional information conveyed by body language much more apparent, hence the invention of emoticons. Once invented emoticon-like things found uses far beyond online chats. I’ve not seen a language population with a written language that makes use of comptuters and that does not have some kind of emoticon like thing, although there’s only two ‘families’ of emoticons that I’ve seen: 😉 and (0\_/0)-ish. b1tr0t: Chinese only uses a subset of the ways to inflect a word for grammatical purposes, and there’s enough ways to inflect a word left over for emotional inflection.
