Punctuation
Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet-based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization, no vowels, and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes space between words and both obsolete and modern signs.
By the 19th century, grammarians explained the difference between the punctuation marks by means of a hierarchy that ascribed different weight to them. Six marks, proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin, could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis.
In rare cases, the meaning of a text can be changed substantially by using different punctuation, such as in "woman, without her man, is nothing", contrasted with "woman: without her, man is nothing". Similar changes in meaning can be achieved in spoken forms of most languages by using elements of speech such as suprasegmentals. The rules of punctuation vary with the language, location, register, and time. In online chat and text messages, punctuation is used tachygraphically, especially among younger users.
History
Western antiquity
During antiquity, most scribes in the West wrote in scriptio continua, i.e., without punctuation delimiting word boundaries. Around the 5th century BC, the Greeks began using punctuation consisting of vertically arranged dots—usually a dicolon or tricolon—as an aid in the oral delivery of texts. After 200 BC, Greek scribes adopted the system invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, where a single dot called a was placed at one of several heights to denote rhetorical divisions in speech:- a low on the baseline to mark off a
- a at midheight to mark off a clause
- a high to mark off a sentence
During the 1st century BC, Romans also made occasional use of symbols to indicate pauses, but by the 4th century AD the Greek —called distinctiones in Latin—prevailed, as reported by Aelius Donatus and Isidore of Seville. Latin texts were sometimes laid out per capitula, where each sentence was placed on its own line. Diples were used, but by the late period, these often degenerated into comma-shaped marks.
Medieval
Punctuation developed dramatically when large numbers of copies of the Bible started to be produced. These were designed to be read aloud, so the copyists began to introduce a range of marks to aid the reader, including indentation, various punctuation marks, and an early version of initial capitals. Jerome and his colleagues, who translated the Bible into Latin, the Vulgate, employed a layout system based on established practices for teaching the speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero. Under his layout per cola et commata every sense-unit was indented and given its own line. This layout was solely used for biblical manuscripts during the 5th–9th centuries, but was abandoned in favor of punctuation.In the 7th–8th centuries Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes, whose native languages were not derived from Latin, added more visual cues to render texts more intelligible. Irish scribes introduced the practice of word separation. Likewise, insular scribes adopted the distinctiones system while adapting it for minuscule script by using not differing height but rather a differing number of marks—aligned horizontally —to signify a pause's duration: one mark for a minor pause, two for a medium one, and three for a major one. Most common were the punctus, a comma-shaped mark, and a 7-shaped mark, often used in combination. The same marks could be used in the margin to mark off quotations.
In the late 8th century, a different system emerged in France under the Carolingian dynasty. Originally indicating how the voice should be modulated when chanting the liturgy, the positurae migrated into any text meant to be read aloud, and then to all manuscripts. Positurae first reached England in the late 10th century, probably during the Benedictine reform movement, but was not adopted until after the Norman conquest. The original positurae were the punctus, marking a minor pause within the sentence, punctus elevatus, marking a major pause within the sentence, punctus versus, marking the end of a declarative sentence, and punctus interrogativus, marking the end of an interrogative sentence. A fifth symbol, the punctus flexus was added in the 10th century to indicate a pause of a value between the punctus and punctus elevatus. In the late 11th/early 12th century, the punctus versus disappeared and was taken over by the simple punctus.
The late Middle Ages saw the addition of the virgula suspensiva, which was often used in conjunction with the punctus for different types of pauses. Direct quotations were marked with marginal diples, as in Antiquity, but from at least the 12th century, scribes also began entering diples within the column of text.
Medieval China
Punctuation marks, especially spacing, were not needed in logographic or syllabic texts because disambiguation and emphasis could be communicated by employing a separate written form distinct from the spoken form of the language. Ancient Chinese classical texts were transmitted without punctuation. However, many Warring States period bamboo texts contain the symbols and indicating the end of a chapter and full stop, respectively. By the Song dynasty, the addition of punctuation to texts by scholars to aid comprehension became common.Printing-press era
The amount of printed material and its readership began to increase after the invention of moveable type in Europe in the 1450s. Martin Luther's German Bible translation was one of the first mass-printed works; he used only virgule, full stop, and less than one percent question marks as punctuation. The focus of punctuation still was rhetorical, to aid reading aloud. As explained by writer and editor Lynne Truss, "The rise of printing in the 14th and 15th centuries meant that a standard system of punctuation was urgently required." Printed books, whose letters were uniform, could be read much more rapidly than manuscripts. Rapid reading, or reading aloud, did not allow time to analyze sentence structures. This increased speed led to the greater use and finally standardization of punctuation, which showed the relationships of words with each other: where one sentence ends and another begins, for example.The introduction of a standard system of punctuation has also been attributed to the Venetian printers Aldus Manutius and his grandson. They have been credited with popularizing the practice of ending sentences with the colon or full stop, inventing the semicolon, making occasional use of parentheses, and creating the modern comma by lowering the virgule. By 1566, Aldus Manutius the Younger was able to state that the main object of punctuation was the clarification of syntax.
By the 19th century, punctuation in the Western world had evolved "to classify the marks hierarchically, in terms of weight". Cecil Hartley's poem identifies their relative values:
The stop point out, with truth, the time of pause
A sentence doth require at ev'ry clause.
At ev'ry comma, stop while one you count;
At semicolon, two is the amount;
A colon doth require the time of three;
The period four, as learned men agree.
The use of punctuation was not standardised until after the invention of printing. According to the 1885 edition of The American Printer, the importance of punctuation was noted in various sayings by children, such as:
Charles the First walked and talked
Half an hour after his head was cut off.
With a semicolon and a comma added, it reads as follows:
Charles the First walked and talked;
Half an hour after, his head was cut off.
In a 19th-century manual of typography, Thomas MacKellar writes:
Typewriters and electronic communication
The introduction of electrical telegraphy with a limited set of transmission codes and typewriters with a limited set of keys influenced punctuation subtly. For example, curved quotes and apostrophes were all collapsed into two characters. The hyphen, minus sign, and dashes of various widths have been collapsed into a single character, sometimes repeated to represent a long dash. The spaces of different widths available to professional typesetters were generally replaced by a single full-character-width space, with typefaces monospaced. In some cases, a typewriter keyboard did not include an exclamation point, which could otherwise be constructed by the overstrike of an apostrophe and a period; the original Morse code did not have an exclamation point.These simplifications have been carried forward into digital writing, with teleprinters and the ASCII character set essentially supporting the same characters as typewriters. Treatment of whitespace in HTML discouraged the practice of putting two full spaces after a full stop, since a single or double space would appear the same on the screen. The full traditional set of typesetting tools became available with the advent of desktop publishing and more sophisticated word processors. Despite the widespread adoption of character sets like Unicode that support the punctuation of traditional typesetting, writing forms like text messages tend to use the simplified ASCII style of punctuation, with the addition of new non-text characters like emoji. Informal text speak tends to drop punctuation when not needed, including some ways that would be considered errors in more formal writing.
In the computer era, punctuation characters were recycled for use in programming languages and URLs. Due to its use in email and Twitter handles, the at sign has gone from an obscure character mostly used by sellers of bulk commodities, to a very common character in common use for both technical routing and an abbreviation for "at". The tilde, in moveable type only used in combination with vowels, for mechanical reasons ended up as a separate key on mechanical typewriters, and like @ it has been put to completely new uses.