The uses of punctuation today are integral parts of writing
structure and we wouldn’t easily understand forms of writing without our
beloved commas, semicolons, and periods. Yet the earliest readers and writers
managed without it for thousands of years!
Ancient Punctuation
The Greeks wrote their texts so that the letters ran
together with no spaces or punctuation and without any distinction between
lowercase and capital letters. Understanding a text on the first read was
unheard of.
In the 3rd Century BCE, a librarian in Alexandria
named Aristophanes devised a new system to help readers more easily shuffle
through texts. He suggested that readers annotate their texts with dots of ink
aligned with the middle (·), bottom
(.) or top (·) of each line. His ‘subordinate’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘full’
points corresponded to the pauses of increasing length.
The Role of Christianity
Not everyone saw
these early punctuation precursors as helpful. When the Romans came into power,
they quickly abandoned Aristophanes’ system of dots. The Romans experimented
for a while with separating words with dots, but by the second century CE they
had abandoned that too.
In the 4th
and 5th centuries, the Roman empire crumbled and Christianity began
to become more widespread. Books became an integral part of the Christian
identity, acquiring decorative letters and paragraph marks. In the 6th Century,
Christian writers began to punctuate their own works long before readers got
their hands on them in order to protect their original meaning.
Later, in the 7th
Century, Isidore of Seville (an archbishop turned saint) described an updated
version of the dot system in which he rearranged the dots in order of height to
indicate short (.), medium (·) and long (·) pauses, respectively. Moreover,
Isidore explicitly connected punctuation with meaning for the first
time: the re-christened subdistinctio, or low point (.), no longer
marked a simple pause but was rather the signpost of a grammatical comma, while
the high point, or distinctio finalis (·), stood for the end of a
sentence.
Spaces between
words appeared soon after this, an invention of Irish and Scottish monks tired
of prying apart unfamiliar Latin words. And towards the end of the 8th Century,
in Germany, the famed king Charlemagne ordered a monk to devise a unified
alphabet of letters that could be read by all his subjects, creating what we
know now as lowercase letters.
A New Era:
Revitalization
Soon came a
plethora of new punctuation like punctus
versus (a medieval version of the semicolon used to terminate sentences), punctus elevatus (an upside-down
semicolon that evolved into the modern colon which suggested changes in tone as
well as grammatical meaning), punctus interrogativus
(an ancestor of the modern-day question mark), the octothorpe (or
modern-day “hashtag”), the pilcrow (modern-day paragraph marker), the ampersand
(&), etc.
Eventually, as
other, more specific symbols were created, Aristophanes’ distinction between
low, medium and high points grew indistinct until all that was left was a
simple point that could be placed anywhere on the line to indicate a pause of
indeterminate length – a confusing mixture of the comma, colon and full stop.
Punctuation as We
Know It
This dot was almost
completely phased out when a 12th century Italian writer named
Boncompagno da Signa proposed an entirely new and visually distinct system of
punctuation comprising only two marks: a slash (/) (or virgula suspensiva)
represented a pause while a dash (—) terminated sentences.
By 1500 CE, da
Signa’s slash dropped to the baseline and gained a slight curve to become the
modern comma; the semicolon and the exclamation mark joined the colon and the question
mark; and Aristophanes’ dot got one last hurrah as the full stop. After that,
the evolution of punctuation began to fade as the new evolution of printing
standardized punctuation as we know it today.
For More Information:
The Mysterious
Origins of Punctuation: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150902-the-mysterious-origins-of-punctuation
The Ancient Roots
of Punctuation:
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