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.
By the 19th century, the punctuation marks were used hierarchically, according to their weight.
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.
History
Western antiquity
During antiquity, most scribes in the West wrote in scriptio continua, i.e. without punctuation delimiting word boundaries. Around the 5th century BC, the Greeks began using punctuation consisting of vertically arranged dots—usually a dicolon or tricolon—as an aid in the oral delivery of texts. After 200 BC, Greek scribes adopted the system invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, where a single dot called a was placed at one of several heights to denote rhetorical divisions in speech:
-
a low on the baseline to mark off a (a unit smaller than a clause)
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a at midheight to mark off a clause ()
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a high to mark off a sentence ()
[E. Otha Wingo, Latin Punctuation in the Classical Age (The Hague, Netherlands: De Gruyter, 1972), 22.]
In addition, the Greeks used the
paragraphos (or
gamma) to mark the beginning of sentences, marginal diples to mark quotations, and a koronis to indicate the end of major sections.
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.
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
began to introduce a range of marks to aid the reader, including indentation, various punctuation marks (diple,
paragraphos, simplex ductus), and an early version of initial capitals (litterae notabiliores).
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 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.
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, punctus elevatus,[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.
Medieval China
Punctuation marks, especially spacing, were not needed in
Logogram or
Syllabary (such as
Written Chinese and
Mayan script) texts because disambiguation and emphasis could be communicated by employing a separate written form distinct from the spoken form of the language. 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.
[林清源，《簡牘帛書標題格式研究》台北： 藝文印書館，2006。(Lin Qingyuan, Study of Title Formatting in Bamboo and Silk Texts Taipei: Yiwen Publishing, 2006.) .] By the
Song dynasty, the addition of punctuation to texts by scholars to aid comprehension became common.
[The History of the Song Dynasty (1346) states 「凡所讀書，無不加標點。」 (Among those who read texts, there are none who do not add punctuation).]
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.
Martin Luther's German Bible translation was one of the first mass printed works, he used only virgule,
full stop and less than one percent
as punctuation. The focus of punctuation still was rhetorical, to aid reading aloud.
[ Historische Kommasetzung bei Luther, en: historical use of comma by Luther, Frank Slotta, for Prof Beatrice Primus, Landesprüfungsamt I NRW, 2010.] 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 (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".[Iona and Peter Opie (1943) I Saw Esau.]
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
[See e.g. Morse code] and
with a limited set of keys influenced punctuation subtly. For example,
curved quotes and
were all collapsed into two characters (' and "). The
hyphen,
minus sign, and dashes of various widths have been collapsed into a single character (-), sometimes repeated to represent a long dash. The spaces of different widths available to professional typesetters were generally replaced by a single full-character width space, with typefaces
. In some cases a typewriter keyboard did not include an exclamation point (!), which could otherwise be 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 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 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 full stops 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 the UK.
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.
are particularly variable across European languages. For example, in
French language and
Russian language, quotes would appear as: « Je suis fatigué. » (In French, the quotation marks are spaced from the enclosed material; in Russian they are not.)
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.
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 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.
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.
Nevertheless, both it and its inverted form were given code points in Unicode: , .
Predecessors of emoticons and emojis
The six additional punctuation marks proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin in his book italic=yes ("Let's pluck the bird", 1966)
could be seen as predecessors of
and
.
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]
-
the "irony point" or "irony mark" (point d'ironie: )
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the "love point" (point d'amour: )
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the "conviction point" (point de conviction: )
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the "authority point" (point d'autorité: )
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the "acclamation point" (point d'acclamation: )
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the "doubt point" (point de doute: )
"Question comma", "exclamation comma"
An international patent application was filed, and published in 1992 under World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) number WO9219458,
for two new punctuation marks: the "question comma" and the "exclamation comma". The
question comma has a comma instead of the dot at the bottom of a question mark, while the
exclamation comma has a comma in place of the point at the bottom of an exclamation mark. These were intended for use as question and exclamation marks within a sentence, a function for which normal question and exclamation marks can also be used, but which may be considered obsolescent. The patent application entered into the national phase only in Canada. It was advertised as lapsing in Australia on 27 January 1994
[Australian Official Journal of Patents, 27 January 1994] and in Canada on 6 November 1995.
[ CIPO – Patent – 2102803 – Financial Transactions ]
Others
Other proposed punctuation marks include:
-
Snark mark, indicating an ironic statement by putting a tilde next to terminal punctuation: for dry sarcasm, for enthusiastic sarcasm, and for sarcastic questions
-
Rhetorical question mark:
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SarcMark for sarcasm
Punctuation marks in Unicode
See also
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Diacritic
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James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher, a word puzzle
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Obelism, the practice of annotating manuscripts with marks set in the margins
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Orthography, the category of written conventions that includes punctuation as well as spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, and emphasis
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Scribal abbreviations, abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in Latin
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Terminal punctuation
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History of sentence spacing for typographical details
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Tironian notes, a system of shorthand that consisted of about 4,000 signs
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Usage
Notes
Citations
Further reading
External links
