Punctuation
Punctuation is the use of spacing, conventional signs, and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading of written text, whether read silently or aloud. Another description is, "It is the practice action or system of inserting points or other small marks into texts in order to aid interpretation; division of text into sentences, clauses, etc., by means of such marks."
In written English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences. For example: "woman, without her man, is nothing", and "woman: without her, man is nothing" have very different meanings; as do "eats shoots and leaves" and "eats, shoots, and leaves". The sharp differences in meaning are produced by the simple differences in punctuation within the example pairs, especially the latter.
The rules of punctuation vary with language, location, register, and time and are constantly evolving. Certain aspects of punctuation are stylistic and are thus the author's choice, or tachygraphic language forms, such as those used in online chat and text messages.
History
The first writing systems were either logographic or syllabicfor example, Chinese and Mayan scriptwhich do not necessarily require punctuation, especially spacing. This is because the entire morpheme or word is typically clustered within a single glyph, so spacing does not help as much to distinguish where one word ends and the other starts. Disambiguation and emphasis can easily be communicated without punctuation by employing a separate written form distinct from the spoken form of the language that uses slightly different phraseology. Even today, written English differs subtly from spoken English because not all emphasis and disambiguation is possible to convey in print, even with punctuation.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, addition of punctuation to texts by scholars to aid comprehension became common.
The earliest alphabetic writing — Phoenician, Hebrew, and others of the same family — had no capitalization, no spaces, no vowels and few punctuation marks. This worked as long as the subject matter was restricted to a limited range of topics. Punctuation is historically an aid to reading aloud.
The oldest known document using punctuation is the Mesha Stele. This employs points between the words and horizontal strokes between the sense section as punctuation.
Western Antiquity
Most texts were still written in scriptura continua, that is without any separation between words. However, the Greeks were sporadically using punctuation marks consisting of vertically arranged dots—usually two or three —in around the 5th century BC as an aid in the oral delivery of texts. Greek playwrights such as Euripides and Aristophanes used symbols to distinguish the ends of phrases in written drama: this essentially helped the play's cast to know when to pause. After 200 BC, the Greeks used Aristophanes of Byzantium's system of a single dot placed at varying heights to mark up speeches at rhetorical divisions:- hypostigmḗ – a low punctus on the baseline to mark off a komma ;
- stigmḕ mésē – a punctus at midheight to mark off a clause ; and
- stigmḕ teleía – a high punctus to mark off a sentence.
The Romans also occasionally used symbols to indicate pauses, but the Greek théseis—under the name distinctiones—prevailed by the AD 4th century as reported by Aelius Donatus and Isidore of Seville. Also, texts were sometimes laid out per capitula, where every sentence had its own separate 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 made a translation of 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 value: one mark for a minor pause, two for a medium one, and three for a major. 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, punctus elevatus, punctus versus, and punctus interrogativus, but 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.
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. 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 semi-colon and a comma added it reads:
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. 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 didn't include an exclamation point but this was 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 have 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.
In English
There are two major styles of punctuation in English: British or American. These two styles differ mainly in the way in which they handle quotation marks, particularly in conjunction with other punctuation marks. In British English, punctuation marks such as periods and commas are placed inside the quotation mark only if they are part of what is being quoted, and placed outside the closing quotation mark if part of the containing sentence. In American English, however, such punctuation is generally placed inside the closing quotation mark regardless. This rule varies for other punctuation marks; for example, American English follows the British English rule when it comes to semicolons, colons, question marks, and exclamation points. The serial comma is used much more often in the United States than in England.Other languages
Other languages of Europe use much the same punctuation as English. The similarity is so strong that the few variations may confuse a native English reader. Quotation marks are particularly variable across European languages. For example, in French and Russian, quotes would appear as: «Je suis fatigué.».In French of France, the signs : ; ? and ! are always preceded by a thin unbreakable space. In Canada, this is only the case for :.
In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point, known as the interpunct#Ano teleia.
In Georgian, three dots,, were formerly used as a sentence or paragraph divider. It is still sometimes used in calligraphy.
Spanish, and no other language, uses an inverted question mark at the beginning of a question and the normal question mark at the end, as well as an inverted exclamation mark at the beginning of an exclamation and the normal exclamation mark at the end.
Armenian uses several punctuation marks of its own. The full stop is represented by a colon, and vice versa; the exclamation mark is represented by a diagonal similar to a tilde, while the question mark resembles an unclosed circle placed after the last vowel of the word.
Arabic, Urdu, and Persian—written from right to left—use a reversed question mark:, and a reversed comma:. This is a modern innovation; pre-modern Arabic did not use punctuation. Hebrew, which is also written from right to left, uses the same characters as in English, and.
Originally, Sanskrit had no punctuation. In the 17th century, Sanskrit and Marathi, both written using Devanagari, started using the vertical bar to end a line of prose and double vertical bars in verse.
Punctuation was not used in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing until the adoption of punctuation from the West in the late 19th and early 20th century. In unpunctuated texts, the grammatical structure of sentences in classical writing is inferred from context. Most punctuation marks in modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have similar functions to their English counterparts; however, they often look different and have different customary rules.
In the Indian subcontinent, is sometimes used in place of colon or after a subheading. Its origin is unclear, but could be a remnant of the British Raj. Another punctuation common in the Indian Subcontinent for writing monetary amounts is the use of or after the number. For example, Rs. 20/- or Rs. 20/= implies 20 rupees whole.
Thai, Khmer, Lao and Burmese did not use punctuation until the adoption of punctuation from the West in the 20th century. Blank spaces are more frequent than full stops or commas.
Further information: Armenian punctuation, Chinese punctuation, Hebrew punctuation, Japanese punctuation and Korean punctuation.
Novel punctuation marks
Interrobang
In 1962, American advertising executive Martin K. Speckter proposed the interrobang, a combination of the question mark and exclamation point, to mark rhetorical questions or questions stated in a tone of disbelief. Although the new punctuation mark was widely discussed in the 1960s, it failed to achieve widespread use."Love point" and similar marks
In 1966, the French author Hervé Bazin proposed a series of six innovative punctuation marks in his book Plumons l'Oiseau. These were:- the "irony point" or "irony mark"
- the "love point"
- the "conviction point"
- the "authority point"
- the "acclamation point"
- the "doubt point"
"Question comma", "exclamation comma"