  The celebrated proverb that "speech is silver, silence is golden" has a long
multinational history and multiple specific meanings. In written texts
punctuation can in fact be considered one of its manifestations. Indeed, the
virtue of effectively speaking and writing involves - often decisively - the
capacity to apply the properly placed breaks. In the present study, based on a
large corpus of world-famous and representative literary texts in seven major
Western languages, it is shown that the distribution of intervals between
consecutive punctuation marks in almost all texts can universally be
characterised by only two parameters of the discrete Weibull distribution which
can be given an intuitive interpretation in terms of the so-called hazard
function. The values of these two parameters tend to be language-specific,
however, and even appear to navigate translations. The properties of the
computed hazard functions indicate that among the studied languages, English
turns out to be the least constrained by the necessity to place a consecutive
punctuation mark to partition a sequence of words. This may suggest that when
compared to other studied languages, English is more flexible, in the sense of
allowing longer uninterrupted sequences of words. Spanish reveals similar
tendency to only a bit lesser extent.
