I am fascinated by the evolution of language but had never given much thought to punctuation. If I gave it any consideration at all, I tended to think of punctuation marks such as the period, the comma, and the apostrophe as somehow having been there from the beginning of writing, appearing somewhat organically along with writing. But according to Florence Hazrat at the University of Sheffield, the origin of punctuation marks can be dated quite precisely.
In the broad sense, punctuation is any glyph or sign in a text that isn’t an alphabet letter. This includes spaces, whose inclusion wasn’t always a given: in classical times stone inscriptions as well as handwritten texts WOULDLOOKLIKETHIS – written on scrolls, potentially unrolling forever. Reasons for continuous script aren’t entirely clear, but might be connected to a conception of writing as record of speech rather than a practice in itself, and since we’re hardly aware of the minuscule pauses we make between words when speaking, it isn’t obvious to register something we do and perceive unconsciously with a designated sign that is a non-sign: blank space.
Writing without punctuation lasted for many hundreds of years, in spite of individual efforts such as those of Aristophanes, the librarian at Alexandria. Around 200 BCE, Aristophanes of Alexandria wished to ease pronunciation of Greek for foreigners by suggesting small circles at different levels of the line for pauses of different lengths, emphasising the rhythm of the sentence though not yet its grammatical shape.
It appears that muchof the punctuation we are familiar with actually owes its origins to one person, the 7th-century churchman and encyclopaedist Isidore of Seville.
Isidore invented the period, comma and colon. He rethought Aristophanes’ punctuation, based on pauses when reading aloud, in terms of grammatical parts of the sentence: an utterance whose sense and grammar were complete would receive a dot at the top of the line, which would eventually migrate down to the bottom and become the full stop or period we know today. An utterance whose sense and grammar were complete but accommodated expansion would get a dot in the centre: the future colon. Lastly, an utterance that was neither complete in sense nor in grammar would be marked off with a dot at the bottom, evolving into the comma. Where previously only the full sentence received a boundary sign, it was now also possible to distinguish the constituents within. Isidore’s ideas circulated widely and, by the end of the same century, Irish monks had added spaces between words to his system of dots. These changes attest to a shift in the perception of writing from record of speech to record of information. Meaning no longer needed to pass from eye to mind via voice and ear, but was directly – silently – apprehended.
…By the late Middle Ages, the comma, the colon and the full stop had established themselves. The exclamation and the question mark joined their ranks, attesting to a need for emotional emphasis and clarification of intonation. What is perfectly clear in speech can become doubtful in its written form, in spite of question words and interrogative grammatical constructions.
…Writers from the end of the 17th century onwards had various marks at their disposal, including question and exclamation marks, brackets and semicolons for pausing and adding, dashes for interruptions and unfinished business, and dot dot dots to signal hesitation or uncertainty, not to speak of hyphens, commas, asterisks, ampersands, footnotes, the humble full stop and space, and countless other marks of punctuation and typographical signs. None of these enjoyed hard-and-fast rules, and all of them were still in the making. Writing had come to touch all areas of private and public life, and with that came a desire to represent through inky marks the vagaries of the mind, the inflections of the voice, and the intensity of feeling.
Not all proposals for punctuation marks caught on.
Frustrated by the misunderstandings arising from a failure to catch tone in writing, the English printer Henry Denham invented a mark denoting sarcasm. Denham offered his sign in 1575. A mirrored question mark, he hoped, would flag up a rhetorical question, making it easier to get the drift of the writer’s intention. But it never caught on.
The article has all manner of additional interesting little details from the history of punctuation.
Of course, we now live in an age when to convey nuance (or to hit people over the head with obviousness) we use the # symbol followed by a word (“#sarcasm’ etc.) and also have a bewilderingly large array of emoticons. They are not universally adopted. I, for one, never use emoticons. This is partly because I think words can more accurately capture my meaning and partly because I am apprehensive that I may accidentally send the wrong emoji, such as replying with a thumbs up or happy face when someone gives me tragic news.
I also never use popular common abbreviations like lol and ttyl even in text messages, and always punctuate any message if they are more than a few words long. I still feel spasms of discomfort to send a text without a salutation such as ‘Hi [name]’ or not end with my name, although that reveals me to be a a weirdo in the text world. I find it easier to carry out my preferences by using my computer with its full keyboard to compose and send text messages, since I find typing on the phone keyboard awkward. I will also sometimes write out longer messages on a word processor, paragraphs and all, so that I can edit them easily, before cutting and pasting it into the text box. What can I say? I am definitely old school.
Interesting that according to the quoted author at least Greek didn’t have anything to denote the end of a word. Ostraca from the Levant have dots (rather than spaces) marking where one word ended and the next started. OTOH words could easily wrap from one line to the next. My favorite ostracon is the Mesad Hashavyahu Ostracon also known as the Yavne-Yam ostracon or ‘the reaper’s complaint’. Shows a record of exploitation of laborers in the late 7th century BCE and an exploited laborer’s attempt to receive justice.
Another detail: early written Greek did not have a favoured direction. They wrote ‘bustrofedon’ or ‘as the oxe plows’ first in one direction, next line in the other.
It is the later Greek left-to-right that distinguishes European writing systems from the Phoenician and related levantine/arabic systems.
(Chain of descent: Eubean Greek -- Etruscan- Latin alphabet)
It is interesting to note that development of punctuation happened around the same time as development of mathematical notation. Can’t be a coincidence. Maybe the printing press has something to do with it. Handwritten non-letters can be too confusing to become widely accepted.
As my granddaughter reminded me this morning, punctuation saves lives. Compare “Let’s eat, Grandma” with “Let’s eat Grandma”.
@4 -- brings to mind the observation of the importance of capital letters, because it’s the difference between helping your uncle Jack off a horse, and….
The word colon itself is Greek and refers to dots as punctuation. Isadore refined the dot system and kept the Greek term afaict.
I have been taught that the reason for early manuscript writing not having spaces was to maximize the very expensive vellum or parchment.
It does make it difficult to read at first, butonceyougetyoureyein it gets easier.
The lack of upper and lowercase letters or standardized spelling is challenging at times. Dots are sometimes used as separators between words, sometimes as ‘and’, but in ON manuscripts a dot is frequently used as an abbreviation for the appropriate suffixes.
Ooh, I just discovered the Percontation point! Pretty clever of me, right⸮
😉
How interesting that ‘old school’ involves an older way of sending text messages. To me, ‘old school’ is when phones were all land lines and were rotary, tv had 3 or 4 channels and was black and white and -- I will stop right there. Old school is turning on the TV in the summer to watch Ernie Banks of the Chicago Cubs hit a home run.
Emoticons (they’re called emojis these days Mano 😉 are invaluable in conveying intent -- every bit as much an indispensable part of modern communication as punctuation.
Eschewing them is every bit as silly as refusing to use those damnable newfangled “commas”. (Except emojis are far more invaluable than commas -- communicating not just a pause, but an entire tone.)
I hate emojis. I have a vision defect in one eye that can’t be fixed. I’ve had it all my life and I can cope with written words and the old-school emoticons are manageable (I don’t always catch the winking eye unless I am expecting it or paying especially close attention), but emojis just look like twisted blobs of color--especially on a phone. And often they add nothing to the message. Recently someone invited me to go someplace with them via text, and I spent far too much time and effort blowing up a picture of a tiny human being walking. I don’t waste time trying to figure out a series of incomprehensible blobs in a row.
@2: I recently learned that the Egyptians wrote in either direction, and the key to understanding which way to read the message was to look at the way the bird/person/whatever’s face was pointing. To the right? Read left-to-right. To the left? Right-to-left.
emoticons are a series of ASCII characters that are meant to resemble a face or convey a mood : -) (°_°)
emoji are actual Unicode symbols 🙂 🙄
Depending on where you are writing, how sophisticated it is, and how much autocorrupt is being applied?; you may intend an emoji and get an emoticon, or write an emoticon and get an emoji.