punctuation

punctuation, the use of spacing, conventional signs, and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading, both silently and aloud, of handwritten and printed texts. The word is derived from the Latin punctus, “point.” From the 15th century to the early 18th the subject was known in English as pointing; and the term punctuation, first recorded in the middle of the 16th century, was reserved for the insertion of vowel points (marks placed near consonants to indicate preceding or following vowels) in Hebrew texts. The two words exchanged meanings between 1650 and 1750.

Since the late 16th century the theory and practice of punctuation have varied between two main schools of thought: the elocutionary school, following late medieval practice, treated points or stops as indications of the pauses of various lengths that might be observed by a reader, particularly when he was reading aloud to an audience; the syntactic school, which had won the argument by the end of the 17th century, saw them as something less arbitrary, namely, as guides to the grammatical construction of sentences. Pauses in speech and breaks in syntax tend in any case to coincide; and although writers are now agreed that the main purpose of punctuation is to clarify the grammar of a text, they also require it to take account of the speed and rhythm of actual speech.

Syntactic punctuation is, by definition, bad when it obscures rather than clarifies the construction of sentences. Good punctuation, however, may be of many kinds: to take two extreme examples, Henry James would be unintelligible without his numerous commas, but Ernest Hemingway seldom needs any stop but the period. In poetry, in which the elocutionary aspect of punctuation is still important, and to a lesser degree in fiction, especially when the style is close to actual speech, punctuation is much at the author’s discretion. In nonfictional writing there is less room for experiment. Stimulating variant models for general use might be the light punctuation of George Bernard Shaw’s prefaces to his plays and the heavier punctuation of T.S. Eliot’s literary and political essays.

Punctuation in Greek and Latin to 1600

The punctuation now used with English and other western European languages is derived ultimately from the punctuation used with Greek and Latin during the classical period. Much work remains to be done on the history of the subject, but the outlines are clear enough. Greek inscriptions were normally written continuously, with no divisions between words or sentences; but, in a few inscriptions earlier than the 5th century bc, phrases were sometimes separated by a vertical row of two or three points. In the oldest Greek literary texts, written on papyrus during the 4th century bc, a horizontal line called the paragraphos was placed under the beginning of a line in which a new topic was introduced. This is the only form of punctuation mentioned by Aristotle. Aristophanes of Byzantium, who became librarian of the Museum at Alexandria about 200 bc, is usually credited with the invention of the critical signs, marks of quantity, accents, breathings, and so on, still employed in Greek texts, and with the beginnings of the Greek system of punctuation. Rhetorical theory divided discourse into sections of different lengths. Aristophanes marked the end of the short section (called a comma) by a point after the middle of its last letter, that of the longer section (colon) by a point after the bottom of the letter, and that of the longest section (periodos) by a point after the top of the letter. Since books were still being written in tall majuscule letters, like those used in inscriptions and like modern capital letters, the three positions were easily distinguishable. Aristophanes’ system was seldom actually used, except in a degenerated version involving only two points. In the 8th or 9th century it was supplemented by the Greek form of question mark (;). The modern system of punctuating Greek texts was established by the Italian and French printers of the Renaissance, whose practice was incorporated in the Greek types cut by Claude Garamond for Francis I of France between 1541 and 1550. The colon is not used in Greek, and the semicolon is represented by a high point. Quotation marks and the exclamation mark were added more recently.

In almost all Roman inscriptions points were used to separate words. In the oldest Latin documents and books, dating from the end of the 1st century bc to the beginning of the 2nd century ad, words were divided by points, and a change of topic was sometimes indicated by paragraphing: the first letter or two of the new paragraph projected into the margin, instead of being indented as has been done since the 17th century. Roman scholars, including the 4th-century grammarian Donatus and the 6th-century patron of monastic learning Cassiodorus, recommended the three-point system of Aristophanes, which was perfectly workable with the majuscule Latin scripts then in use. In practice, however, Latin books in their period were written continuously—the point between words had been abandoned. The ends of sentences were marked, if at all, by only a gap (which might be followed by an enlarged letter) or by an occasional point. The only books that were well punctuated at that time were copies of the Vulgate Bible, for which its translator, St. Jerome (died 419/420), devised punctuation per cola et commata (“by phrases”), a rhetorical system, based on manuscripts of Demosthenes and Cicero, which was especially designed to assist reading aloud. Each phrase began with a letter projecting into the margin and was in fact treated as a minute paragraph, before which the reader was expected to take a new breath.

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Punctuation

During the 7th and 8th centuries, which saw the transition from majuscule to minuscule handwriting (minuscule scripts were usually smaller than majuscule and had projections above and below the body of the letters, as in modern lowercase letters), scribes to whom the Latin language was no longer as well known as it had been—especially Irish, Anglo-Saxon, and German scribes, to whom it was a foreign language—began to separate words. It was only in the 13th century that monosyllables, especially prepositions, were finally detached from the word following them. The introduction of spaces between words was critical to the development of silent reading, a practice that began only about the 10th century. To mark sentences, a space at the end became the rule; and an enlarged letter, often a majuscule, generally stood at the beginning of sentences and paragraphs alike. The use of points was somewhat confused by St. Isidore of Sevilla (died 636), whose encyclopaedia recommended an aberrant version of the three-point system; but a point, high or low, was still used within or after sentences. The ends of sentences were often marked by a group of two or three marks, one of which might be a comma and not a simple point.

St. Jerome’s concern for the punctuation of sacred texts was shared by Charlemagne, king of the Franks and Holy Roman emperor, and his Anglo-Saxon adviser Alcuin, who directed the palace school at Aachen from 782 to 796. An important element in the educational revival over which they presided was the improvement of spelling and punctuation in biblical and liturgical manuscripts. It is in the earliest specimens of the new Carolingian minuscule script, written at Corbie and Aachen about 780–800, that the first evidence for a new system of punctuation appears. It soon spread, with the script itself, throughout Europe, reaching its perfection in the 12th century. Single interior stops in the form of points or commas and final groups of stops continued in use; but they were joined by the mark later known as punctus elevatus () and by the question mark (punctus interrogativus), of much the same shape as the modern one but inclined to the right. The source of these two new marks was apparently the system of musical notation, called neumes, which is known to have been used for Gregorian chant from at least the beginning of the 9th century. Punctus elevatus and punctus interrogativus indicated not only a pause and a syntactic break but also an appropriate inflection of the voice. By the 12th century another mark, punctus circumflexus (), had been added to elevatus to indicate a rising inflection at the end of a subordinate clause, especially when the grammatical sense of the sentence was still not complete. Liturgical manuscripts in particular, between the 10th and the 13th centuries, made full use of this inflectional system: it is the origin of the “colon” still used to divide verses of the Psalms in breviaries and prayer books. In the later Middle Ages it was especially the Cistercian, Dominican, and Carthusian orders and the members of religious communities such as the Brethren of the Common Life who troubled to preserve a mode of punctuation admirably adapted to the constant reading aloud, in church and refectory, that characterized the religious life. The hyphen, to mark words divided at the ends of lines, appeared late in the 10th century; single at first, it was often doubled in the period between the 14th and 18th centuries.

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Most late medieval punctuation was haphazard by comparison with 12th-century work—notably in the university textbooks produced at Paris, Bologna, and Oxford in the 13th and 14th centuries. In them, as elsewhere, a form of paragraph mark representing c for capitulum (“chapter”) is freely used at the beginning of sentences. Within the same period the plain point and punctus elevatus are joined by the virgule (/) as an alternative form of light stop. Vernacular literature followed the less formal types of Latin literature; and the printers, as usual, followed the scribes. The first printed texts of the Bible and the liturgy are, as a rule, carefully punctuated on the inflectional principle. The profusion of points and virgules in the English books of the printer William Caxton pays remarkably little attention to syntax. Parentheses appeared about 1500. During the 15th century some English legal documents were already being written without punctuation; and British and American lawyers still use extremely light punctuation in the hope of avoiding possible ambiguities.

The beginnings of postmedieval punctuation can be traced to the excellent manuscripts of classical and contemporary Latin texts copied in the new humanistic scripts by Italian scribes of the 15th century. To about 1450, the point and the punctus elevatus seem to have been preferred for minor pauses; after that date they are often replaced by the virgule and what is now called the colon (:). The virgule, originally placed high, sank to the baseline and developed a curve—it turned, in fact, into a modern comma. The Venetian editor and printer Aldus Manutius (Aldo Manuzio; died 1515) made improvements in the humanistic system, and in 1566 his grandson of the same name expounded a similar system in his Orthographiae ratio (“System of Orthography”); it included, under different names, the modern comma, semicolon, colon, and full point, or period. Most importantly, the younger Aldo stated plainly for the first time the view that clarification of syntax is the main object of punctuation. By the end of the 17th century the various marks had received their modern names, and the exclamation mark, quotation marks, and the dash had been added to the system.