To punctuate or not to punctuate, that is the question debated recently on the Pens website. It seems to be a Marmite issue – those that are content with unmarked scripts and others for whom it is anathema.
Which led me to ponder the origins and development of punctuation.
The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found on the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The stele or monument comes from the Moabite region, now part of modern Jordan.
In ancient versions of languages that use characters, such as Chinese, punctuation marks and spaces were not needed, as a separate written form distinct from the spoken language avoided disambiguation. By 400 BC, punctuation marks began to appear in Chinese; towards the end of the 1st century AD, they became common.
In the West, scribes used scriptio continua, likewise with no spaces, punctuation marks or capital letters. By the 5th century BC, the Greeks introduced vertically arranged dots – usually a dicolon or tricolon to aid oral delivery of texts. By 200 BC, Greek scribes employed the théseis system invented by Aristophanes, a single dot called a punctus placed at various heights to denote rhetorical divisions in speech. A paragraphos marked the beginning of a sentence, a diple or antilambda in the margin a quotation and a koronis the end of a major section.
The game changer was the production of large numbers of copies of the Bible. These were intended to be read aloud and a range of marks were introduced to aid the reader, plus an early version of capital letters. The Vulgate bible, translated into Latin in 400 AD, adopted an established system for teaching the speeches of Demosthenese and Cicero.
Punctuation as we know it today was spawned by the invention of moveable type and the printing press in Europe in the 1450s. Printed books with uniform letters could be read more rapidly than manuscripts, but did not allow time to analyse sentence structures. This drove the movement towards standardised punctuation, whose introduction is attributed to Venetian printer Aldus Manutius. Today, even Far Eastern languages have punctuation.
For me, punctuation marks are signposts, guiding you along the road of writing. Not only do they delineate who is speaking without having to read and re-read a paragraph, they can also change the meaning of a sentence entirely.
‘Woman, without her, man is nothing’.
‘Woman, without her man, is nothing’.
Same sentence, diametrically opposite meanings.
While languages share the same marks, they can mean different things. In English and French, the diaresis indicates that two adjacent vowels are pronounced separately eg Citroën. In German, this mark is called an umlaut and when placed over a, o or u, softens the pronunciation of that vowel.
Does your writing get full marks?
Image by lemaildeclaire via Pixabay
Very timely after my Cormac McCarthy review! Haha. Really interesting, Nigel. I enjoyed reading this one.
I wonder if the circle is squared between this article and the McCarthy review? The corollary of the concept that punctuation makes texts easier and faster to read is that lack of punctuation slows the reader down and makes them pay more attention, one of the points made for McCarthy’s style, I beleive.
Seeing punctuation as a written language evolution makes me also wonder if we will see emoticons enter ‘proper’ writing as a grammar style too. I have to admit that in e-mail communication, which is perhaps written faster and with less precision than other text forms, does benefit from emoticons to share the intended emotional drift.
Today my favourite is ‘Let’s eat Grandma’. A close second is a book acknowledgement ‘I’d like to thank my parents Margaret Thatcher and God’.
This reminded me of a section in my thesis where I discuss use of speech marks over time. It gave me cause to reread the chapter and now I’m basking in a sense of achievement for actually completing a PhD. Thank you, Nigel!
I am so in agreement with you all – punctuation is such fun!
I’ve got Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves. It could also be titled A Difficult Birth Punctuation.
Trouble is, not even all of the countries purporting to use the English language can agree on how to punctuate!