Early Punctuation

I had planned on responding to Scottie's original comments and to a few even
older messages but school kept me away. I have two papers to write -- one
on infinity and one on Galileo's _Two New Sciences_ -- in the next two
weeks, and reading Descartes and Pascal has me spending all of my time
contemplating the infinite and God and the comparative roles of reason and
intuition. And I'm trying to learn enough French this semester to read it.
To attempt being a classical liberal artist means to be seldom idle.

But I do have a few minutes this evening with which to elaborate on the
history of the written word. It should provide an enjoyable break from
Pascal's assertions of human wretchedness.

Where to begin, then?

The earliest writing, as has already been stated, was written without spaces
between words. This practice continued even with the use of the Greek
alphabet, the first true vocalic alphabet (which was, to my estimation, one
of the most important and one of the most brilliant of all human
inventions). The words sometimes even ran spaceless from the left side of
the page to the right, then from the right to the left, zig-zagging all the
way down. This is not entirely counter-intuitive if we try to think without
our prejudices, and it is important to remember that we do not regularly
leave spaces between words in speech.

With a strong grasp of the language, reading spaceless text is easier in
Greek and languages of its kind than to do likewise in English, and the
primary reason must be Greek's very regular morphology. If one encounters a
noun declension, and several letters later recognizes a verb conjugation,
what came between the inflected endings must be the verb. Since so few
Greek words are left uninflected, it is easy to see where each word ends.
Spaceless Greek is also easier because of the simple relationship between
its phonology and its spelling. English carries the fossilized remains of
its long evolution as a written language in the form of very messy spelling,
whereby there is often not an easy and regular letter-to-sound relationship,
and the sound or quality or duration or accent of a particular vowel or
syllable is informed by other parts of the word. Reading English without
spaces requires some effort to determine the boundaries of words, and
without seeing the boundary one is inclined to mangle pronunciation, thereby
making it even more difficult to see boundaries. This is an excruciating
ordeal, and reading Greek without spaces is comparatively simple (although
it's still a lot easier with spaces, of course). It is probably important
that the Semitic languages, which were written long before Greek and which
lack Greek's regular morphology, favored spaces between words long, long
before they became common in the heavily inflected languages.

Ancient Greek was a tonal language -- characterized by a rising and falling
in PITCH, rather than the accent of English and Modern Greek, which is
primarily the effect of strong or weak expiration -- making it a rather
musical. The Greek word for accent marks is "prosodia," which is also used
to refer to songs sung to music, and which literally means something like
"to music." The invention of accent marks -- acute to indicate raising
pitch, grave to indicate falling pitch, and the circumflex, which can only
occur on long vowels, to indicate a rising and falling -- was attributed to
Aristophanes of Byzantium, librarian at Alexandria around 200 B.C.E. These
were supposedly to fix correct accentuation, to indicate dialectical
differences and shifts, and to ease the learning of the language by foreign
speakers. They were some of the earliest punctuation marks, but were not
regularly used in manuscripts until the second half of the first millennium
C.E.

The word "punctuation" comes from the Latin "punctus," which means "point."
Until only a few hundred years ago, in fact, the most common English word
for punctuation was, I understand, "pointing." The ostensible purpose of
punctuation is to inform one of how to read those aspects of sentences that
are not clear from the words alone. But to someone living before the
invention of punctuation, what these aspects are is not at all clear; so the
development of punctuation was somewhat slow and plodding. The most obvious
aspect of speech that is apart from the words is the pauses that sometimes
occur between them, so some of the earliest punctuation indicate such
pauses. It took a while, however, to distinguish different qualities of
pause. It might even be that something of our idea of the sentence-proper,
as some sort of grammatically complete and distinct body, is the result of
writing and punctuation. How much of the unprepared speech of most of those
without substantial training in reading and writing really comes in complete
and cohesive sentences, after all? Much of the written language that
predates punctuation consists of many sentences/clauses strung together with
simple copulatives, which occur in our speech much less frequently.

Ancient Greek sometimes had two or three vertical dots (like a colon or a
colon with an extra dot) to indicate a pause, whether the end of a
"sentence" or a logical pause within one. The Semitic languages have had
and in some contexts, I believe, even continue to have, similar practices.
More comprehensive punctuation with different marks for different qualities
of pause first appear, as far as I know, in Alexandrian manuscripts (circa
200 B.C.E.) of the bawdy comedies of Aristophanes (this is a different
Aristophanes than the one mentioned before), who had already been dead for
probably almost two centuries. We can thus attribute much of the conceptual
basis for punctuation to those scholars at the Alexandrian library in the
last centuries B.C.E. Spaces were still quite unheard-of in Greek, were
still quite rare in written language, and even these "pointings" remained
rather rare for many centuries.

But the mark to indicate the end of a question, from the earliest time that
such things were indicated, was as far as I know a dot mid-line with a
vertical line below it. Why that? I have no idea, and I'm not sure anybody
does. I'd be very eager to hear of any theories, if they exist. A question
mark of that essential form, one looking like our semi-colon, is still used
in Modern Greek.

Miniscule, or lower-case letters, didn't show up until the middle or late
first millennium C.E., and were popularized by medieval scribes. Spaces
between words became common shortly after that, toward the end of the first
millennium. Interestingly, the practice of reading silently, in one's own
head, seems to have coincided with this. In the centuries that preceded it,
the custom was to read aloud, and surprise at individuals who read silently
were even recorded in historical records. This was recorded of Julius
Caesar, although I am currently at a loss for in what history; and St.
Augustine's surprise at someone reading scripture silently (I forget who it
was) is recorded in his _Confessions_.

Some English manuscripts (usually, I believe, Middle-English) have the
"punctus elevatus" which looks like an upside-down semi-colon and behaved,
it seems, in a similar way. It disappeared and was replaced by the modern
semi-colon, which I am told was sometimes called a "comma-colon" or
"subdistinction," sometime after Chaucer but before Shakespeare or the King
James.

Some early medieval manuscripts employed the "punctus interrogativus" to
indicate a question, which was, as I understand it, some sort of squiggly
line above a period. This remained rare, however, since questions were
recognized by their grammar, and since punctuation was still uncommon and
inconsistently used. The modern question mark began to appear in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

It seems to me that the modern semi-colon might well have risen quite
independently from the Greek question mark. It seems also distinctly
possible that our familiar question mark evolved out of the Greek question
mark, making the leap from a dot and a line to a dot and a squiggle, with
the squiggle eventually (and quite late) taking the distinct and
recognizable form. (The other explanation I've heard, like that for the
exclamation mark, that it was formed by combining the first and last letters
of a certain Latin word, seems to me improbable, or at least less probable.)

-robbie
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Received on Tue Sep 17 04:11:43 2002