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Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of writing text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. Encyclopædia Britannica: "Punctuation. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet-based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization, no vowels (see abjad), and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights (such as Euripides and Aristophanes) did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes space between words and both obsolete and modern signs.
By the 19th century, grammarians explained the difference between the punctuation marks by means of a hierarchy that ascribed different weight to them. Six marks, proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin, could be seen as predecessors of and .
In rare cases, the meaning of a text can be changed substantially by using different punctuation, such as in "woman, without her man, is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of men to women), contrasted with "woman: without her, man is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of women to men).Lynne Truss (2003). . Profile Books. . Similar changes in meaning can be achieved in spoken forms of most languages by using elements of speech such as suprasegmentals. The rules of punctuation vary with the language, location, register, and time. In online chat and Text messaging, punctuation is used Tachygraphy, especially among younger users.
During the 1st century BC, Ancient Rome also made occasional use of symbols to indicate pauses, but by the 4th century AD the Greek —called distinctiones in Latin—prevailed, as reported by Aelius Donatus and Isidore of Seville (7th century). Latin texts were sometimes laid out per capitula, where each sentence was placed on its own line. Diples were used, but by the late period, these often degenerated into comma-shaped marks.
In the 7th–8th centuries Irish people and Anglo-Saxons scribes, whose 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 (so as to be more prominent) by using not differing height but rather a differing number of marks—aligned horizontally (or sometimes triangularly)—to signify a pause's duration: one mark for a minor pause, two for a medium one, and three for a major one. Most common were the punctus, a comma-shaped mark, and a 7-shaped mark (comma positura), 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 Francia 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, marking a minor pause within the sentence, punctus elevatus, marking a major pause within the sentence, punctus versus, marking the end of a declarative sentence, and punctus interrogativus, marking the end of an interrogative sentence. 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 (now with two distinct values).Raymond Clemens & Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Ithaca–London: Cornell UP, 2007), 84–6.
The late Middle Ages saw the addition of the virgula suspensiva (slash or slash with a midpoint dot), 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 (sometimes double) within the column of text.
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 (period), 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:
These simplifications have been carried forward into digital writing, with and the ASCII character set essentially supporting the same characters as typewriters. Treatment of whitespace in HTML discouraged the practice (in English prose) of putting two full spaces after a full stop, since a single or double space would appear the same on the screen. (Most style guides now discourage double spaces, and some electronic writing tools, including Wikipedia's software, automatically collapse double spaces to single.) The full traditional set of typesetting tools became available with the advent of desktop publishing and more sophisticated . 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 . Due to its use in email and Twitter handles, the at sign (@) has gone from an obscure character mostly used by sellers of bulk commodities (10 pounds @$2.00 per pound), 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 the French language of France and Belgium, the marks , , and are preceded by a thin space. In Canadian French, this is only the case for .
In Greek language, 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 ano teleia (άνω τελεία).
In Georgian, three dots were formerly used as a sentence or paragraph divider. It is still sometimes used in calligraphy.
Spanish language and Asturian (both of them Romance languages used in Spain) use 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 language—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 language, 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 language, 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 language, Japanese, Korean language, and Vietnamese chữ Nôm 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 it could be a remnant of the British Raj. Another punctuation practice 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 whole rupees.
Thai language, Khmer language, Lao language, and Burmese language 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.
These were: Revised preliminary proposal to encode six punctuation characters introduced by Hervé Bazin in the UCS by Mykyta Yevstifeyev and Karl Pentzlin, 28 Feb. 2012
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