"..."
- Thread starter ihsaan
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The only explanation I can give is that the usage of punctuation marks is not as firmly fixed in Arabic writing as in European languages. You can find texts with no punctuation at all, or very few. Other writers think they're "mending this problem" by putting commas and full stops everywhere in their texts.
I believe it is fairly universal nowadays to use the "..." to refer to skipped over text or an incomplete idea or when the rest of the idea can be inferred. So, my guess is that this is how it is being used in the text that you saw. If you could provide an example of where you saw the three periods, then that would help us understand what is intended.
Well, I am currently reading Harry Potter translated into Arabic, and it seems that the translator is just using ".." in stead of full stops. Actually, the translator hasn't been very consequent when it comes to the dots. Sometimes it is two, three, and sometimes (actually rarely) only one, and sometimes as much as four. Actually, it seems that she uses two dots more than three. But I have seen three dots being used the same way in a text talking about an event that was going to take place.
Does she write the quotation marks as well, or is that just you quoting the punctuation? If it's just the ellipsis that appears in the text, then it might have already been there in the original English text...
I think the editing of the book was very bad. In proper printed books and other formal texts I only find multipul dots to mean "missing text" or "missing information" or "etc". However, I have seen people on the net use multipul dots in abundance, I've asked once or twice and the explanation was "it makes the text clearer". Personally, I think they are wrong but maybe that was what the translator thinks.
Are ever 3 Arabic full stops (i.e., ۔۔۔) used to indicate an ellipsis?