When was punctuation developed

Aristophanes had offered a solution to the completely run-on writing style of the Greeks, which featured spaces between letters, words, clauses, or sentences. Aristophanes proposed that writers use three types of dots to allocate the appropriate pause between formal parts of speech.

A dot located in the bottom denoted a short pause like a comma, the middle was for an intermediate pause like a colon, and the bottom was for a pause much like a full stop. With this, a reader would know when to pause and for how long to produce cohesive and understandable speech. Alas, the Aristophanean method was eventually scrapped when the Roman empire gained precedence over the Greeks from their politics to their writing.

The Romans, namely Cicero, believed the speaker should exert discretion over his or her rhythm of speech and not be bound by dots or punctuation. In the 7 th century, Isidore of Seville resurrected the dots originally proposed by Aristophanes. It was in this writing that he presented an updated version of the Aristophanean system. He went beyond the simple method of dots denoting pauses and attached more significant meaning to each dot: the highest dot marked the end of a sentence while the lowest dot functioned much like a comma does today.

The work of Isidore of Seville was widely respected and he was even cited by Dante Alighieri and quoted by Geoffrey Chaucer. Etymologiae was treated as a textbook through the Middle Ages and no doubt had a profound effect on how writers used grammar and punctuation.

Just like learners of new languages, users of punctuation have since elaborated on the dot system Aristophanes first invented in order to produce even more useful and distinguishing meanings today. According to Keith Houston, music was a major influence for punctuation because musical notation used symbols like the breve and caesura to indicate notes and rests—a necessary component of written language to determine pauses. One example, which comes from Gregorian chants, is the punctus elevat as which serves as our modern-day colon.

With each symbol offering more precise meaning than the last, the originally proposed by Aristophanes eventually faded into history as their usage diminshed. However, the use of a single dot held its ground and retained a meaning of pause albeit for an unspecified amount of time.

Interestingly, modern spoken transcriptions in linguistics are often annotated with a period to indicate pauses shorter than a second. The question mark? There are some theories on how the shape of the question mark came about; Oxford Dictionaries offers the theory that it began as a dot with a rising tilde.

Just like many of our letters and words, this theory states that the symbol transformed into the shape it is today due to the vast amount of users approximating its shape in writing. The first usage of the colon dates back to the s to denote a pause time greater than a comma but less than a full stop.

The semicolon has a much earlier history with its first written use in Its purpose was to allow the writer to produce new ideas and topics between phrases without producing a new sentence.

Originally, the colon was simply an upside down semicolon but the single open inverted comma-like top eroded down to a single point. Punctus elevatus Source: Harvard University. One theory for the exclamation mark! It was first used in English in the 15 th century but, interestingly, only had its own dedicated key on a typewriter from the s. The apostrophe was first used this way by Geoffrey Tory in French in It was used at the junction of two vowel sounds e.

Taking this feature from the French language, English speakers used this feature so they could contract words and leave out unpronounced letters without losing any meaning. It could be surmised that the printing press, an industry that charged per letter, encouraged writers to use the apostrophe to save money.

And, finally, the single dot originally proposed by Aristophanes has become the full stop. It also holds the title of the most common punctuation mark in English as it is used to denote the end of a sentence. The invention of the printing press in the s helped to solidify and determine the importance of punctuation through the large-scale production of texts read by many people.

The cult of public speaking was a strong one, to the extent that all reading was done aloud: most scholars agree that the Greeks and Romans got round their lack of punctuation by murmuring aloud as they read through texts of all kinds. Whereas pagans had always passed along their traditions and culture by word of mouth, Christians preferred to write down their psalms and gospels to better spread the word of God.

As it spread across Europe, Christianity embraced writing and rejuvenated punctuation. In the 6th Century, Christian writers began to punctuate their own works long before readers got their hands on them in order to protect their original meaning.

Books became an integral part of the Christian identity, acquiring decorative letters and paragraph marks Credit: Alamy. Moreover, Isidore explicitly connected punctuation with meaning for the first time: the re-christened subdistinctio , or low point.

Spaces between words appeared soon after this, an invention of Irish and Scottish monks tired of prying apart unfamiliar Latin words. And towards the end of the 8th Century, in the nascent country of Germany, the famed king Charlemagne ordered a monk named Alcuin to devise a unified alphabet of letters that could be read by all his far-flung subjects, thus creating what we now know as lowercase letters.

Writing had come of age, and punctuation was an indispensable part of it. Another new mark, an ancestor of the question mark called the punctus interrogativus , was used to punctuate questions and to convey a rising inflection at the same time The related exclamation mark came later, during the 15th Century.

In the earliest days of recorded writing, readers relied on context cues to do the interpretive work that punctuation aids. Presumably in the earliest days of writing, people relied on speaking aloud what was written in order to fully understand the text.

Isidore was a member of the clergy, and before long Irish monks began using his system of punctuation in their translation work. Hazrat explains how these punctuation marks transformed the experience of reading:. These changes attest to a shift in the perception of writing from record of speech to record of information.

Meaning no longer needed to pass from eye to mind via voice and ear, but was directly — silently — apprehended. As writing was better able to approximate speech, new ideas for punctuation were introduced.

The exclamation and the question mark joined their ranks, attesting to a need for emotional emphasis and clarification of intonation. The inscribed stone, also known as the Mesha Stele dates from around BC and tells of the greatness of King Mesha of Moab in modern-day Jordan ; it features points between words and vertical strokes to mark the end of sections that might be comparable to biblical verses.

Most historians believe that punctuation as we know it today was invented to show how a text should be read aloud.