Language/Modern-greek-1453/Culture/The-mysterious-origins-of-punctuation

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Keith Houston delves into the fascinating history of familiar punctuation marks such as commas, semicolons, and question marks, which, despite seeming indispensable now, weren't always part of the written language. These punctuation marks play a vital role in making writing more comprehensible, signaling grammatical structures, and helping us to articulate written text into speech or mental imagery. Interestingly, though we might find it hard to imagine written text without these punctuation marks today, early civilizations managed to communicate through written words without these for many centuries.

During the 3rd century BCE, a librarian named Aristophanes from the Hellenic Egyptian city of Alexandria initiated a revolution in writing. As the chief librarian at the famous Alexandria library, he found it quite challenging to read the countless scrolls written in a continuous stream of letters without any spaces, punctuation, or differentiation between lower and upper cases. This is how the Greeks had been writing for as long as anyone could remember.

However, this lack of punctuation or word spaces was not perceived as a problem during those times. In early democratic societies like Greece and Rome, the spoken language, especially persuasive speech during debates by elected officials, held higher significance than the written language. People were prepared for the effort of deciphering a scroll before public recitation. In fact, comprehending a text in a single reading was a rarity.

Joining the dots[edit | edit source]

Aristophanes proposed a radical idea for making reading less daunting - punctuating documents with ink dots placed in alignment with the middle, bottom, or top of each line. While this wasn't exactly the punctuation system we're familiar with today, it laid the groundwork for it.

Unfortunately, this innovative system didn't find universal acceptance. When the Romans emerged as the major empire-builders, they disregarded Aristophanes' system of dots. Furthermore, their brief experiment with separating words with dots was also abandoned by the second century CE. Given the strong culture of public speaking, most reading was done aloud, which helped navigate the lack of punctuation.

Writing comes of age[edit | edit source]

The resurgence of punctuation came about with the advent of Christianity. As Christians started writing down their psalms and gospels for wider dissemination, books became an essential part of their identity. By the 6th Century, Christian writers began punctuating their work to safeguard its original meaning. Further developments in punctuation, like spaces between words and the creation of lowercase letters, followed suit, transforming writing into a more sophisticated system.

Cutting a dash[edit | edit source]

Over time, as Aristophanes’ dots became more common, new punctuation marks emerged. Some drew inspiration from musical notation, inventing symbols like the punctus versus (a precursor to the semicolon) and the punctus elevatus (the predecessor of the modern colon) that indicated changes in tone along with grammatical meaning. The birth of the question mark, or the punctus interrogativus, provided a means to punctuate questions and represent a rising inflection simultaneously.

The three-dot system of Aristophanes inevitably waned with the advent of more specific symbols. However, a new system proposed by the 12th Century Italian writer, Boncompagno da Signa, featuring only two marks - a slash (/) to denote a pause, and a dash (—) to end sentences, emerged. The slash, also known as the virgula suspensiva, was especially successful. It was compact, visually distinctive, and gradually replaced the remaining elements of Aristophanes's system as a universal comma or pause.

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Marianthi

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