Where Did Punctuation Come From? Dots, Breathing and the Invention of the Space
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Ancient Greek and Latin were written without gaps between the words, without capital letters and without any mark to show where a sentence ended, in an unbroken river of letters that a reader had to sound out aloud to understand. Every device that makes a modern page readable, the space, the full stop, the comma, the question mark, the paragraph and the capital, was invented by somebody, mostly by librarians, monks and printers, and mostly for reasons that had nothing to do with grammar. The system took about two thousand years to assemble and was standardised only when printing made inconsistency expensive.
Reading aloud
Writing without spaces, scriptio continua, is less mad than it looks in a culture where reading is done aloud and where texts are speeches, poems or laws that a reader has usually heard before. The reader's job was performance, and the pauses were worked out from the sense as the voice found them; Augustine, in the fourth century, records his astonishment at finding Ambrose reading silently, with his eyes only, as though it were a feat. The first marks were aids to that performance rather than to grammar. In the second century BC a librarian at Alexandria, Aristophanes of Byzantium, devised a system of three dots to mark the length of the pauses a reader should take, high, middle and low against the line, and named them for the units of speech they closed.
Monks and the space
The marks were used haphazardly for centuries and were rescued by people for whom Latin was a foreign language. Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks from the seventh century, copying scripture in a tongue they had learned from books, could not rely on knowing where the words broke, so they put spaces between them, and the innovation spread across Europe with their manuscripts. Charlemagne's scribes in the eighth and ninth centuries added a clear minuscule hand, capital letters at the start of sections, and a more consistent use of the dots, and the monastic scriptorium, where silence was the rule and reading had become an eye's business rather than a voice's, had every reason to make a page that could be understood without being spoken. By the twelfth century a European manuscript looks broadly like a page of text.
The marks and where they came from
Most of the symbols on a keyboard have a traceable origin:
- •The full stop and comma: Aristophanes's low and middle dots, given their modern shapes and jobs by the Italian printers of the fifteenth century
- •The question mark: probably from a mark used in the eighth century to show a rising voice, and possibly a compressed form of the Latin quaestio
- •The exclamation mark: from io, the Latin cry of joy, written with the i above the o
- •The paragraph: from a mark in the margin, and the pilcrow sign from a C for capitulum, chapter, which scribes left space for and rubricators often failed to fill in, leaving the indent used ever since
- •The semicolon: invented by the printer Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1494, to mark a pause longer than a comma and shorter than a colon
- •The apostrophe: introduced in sixteenth-century French to mark an omitted letter, and pressed later into showing possession, which is the source of most of the trouble it causes
- •Quotation marks: from the diple, a marginal arrow used by ancient scribes to flag a notable line, which drifted into the text and multiplied
Printing and the rules
Printing forced consistency, because a printer setting a thousand copies has to choose. Manutius and his grandson standardised the Italian system, English printers adopted and adapted it, and by the eighteenth century grammarians were writing rules and telling readers that the marks belonged to syntax rather than to breathing, a change of theory that the marks themselves did not notice. Usage has gone on moving since. The eighteenth century punctuated heavily, with commas at every clause; the twentieth lightened it; the semicolon, Manutius's invention, has been declining for a century and is now a marker of a certain kind of writer. New marks appear rarely and mostly fail, the interrobang of 1962 and the irony mark proposed in the nineteenth century among them, and the ones that have succeeded lately arrived from the keyboard: the emoticon, the emoji and the full stop at the end of a text message, which younger readers report as reading like anger, since in a medium where the line break does the work of the full stop, using one is a deliberate act.
The takeaway
Punctuation was assembled over two thousand years: the Greeks and Romans wrote without spaces or marks and read aloud, a librarian at Alexandria added dots for the length of pauses around 200 BC, Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks put spaces between words because Latin was foreign to them, and Venetian printers standardised the shapes and added the semicolon in the 1490s. The marks were breathing instructions before grammarians reassigned them to syntax, and the system is still moving, as the falling semicolon and the loaded full stop of a text message show.