Punctuation

Punctuation marks are symbols that indicate the structure and organization of written language, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading aloud.

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 greatly different meanings, as do "eats shoots and leaves" and "eats, shoots and leaves".^[1] "King Charles walked and talked half an hour after his head was cut off" is alarming; "King Charles walked and talked; half an hour after, his head was cut off", less so. (For English usage, see the articles on specific punctuation marks.)

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 (or editor's) choice. Tachygraphic language forms, such as those used in online chat and text messages, may have wildly different rules.

[edit] History

The first writing systems were mostly logographic and/or syllabic, for example Chinese and Maya script, and they 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, formal written modern English differs subtly from spoken English because not all emphasis and disambiguation is possible to convey in print, even with punctuation.

The earliest alphabetic writing had no capitalization, no spaces and few punctuation marks. This worked as long as the subject matter was restricted to a limited range of topics (e.g., writing used for recording business transactions). Punctuation is historically an aid to reading aloud (vis George Bernard Shaw).

The oldest known document using punctuation is the Mesha Stele (9th century BC). This employs points between the words and horizontal strokes between the sense section as punctuation.

The Greeks were using punctuation marks consisting of vertically arranged dots - usually two (cf. the modern colon) or three - in around the 5th century BC. 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. In particular, they used three different symbols to divide speeches, known as commas (indicated by a centred dot), colons (indicated by a dot on the base line), and periods or full stops (indicated by a raised dot).

The Romans (circa 1st century BC) also adopted symbols to indicate pauses.

Punctuation developed dramatically when large numbers of copies of the Christian Bible started to be produced. These were designed to be read aloud and 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. St Jerome and his colleagues, who produced the Vulgate translation of the Bible into Latin, developed an early system (circa 400 AD); this was considerably improved on by Alcuin. The marks included the virgule (forward slash) and dots in different locations; the dots were centred in the line, raised or in groups.

The introduction of a standard system of punctuation has also been attributed to 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.^[1]

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.^[2]

Shortly after the invention of printing, the necessity of stops or pauses in sentences for the guidance of the reader produced the colon and full point. In process of time, the comma was added, which was then merely a perpendicular line, proportioned to the body of the letter. These three points were the only ones used until the close of the fifteenth century, when Aldo Manuccio gave a better shape to the comma, and added the semicolon; the comma denoting the shortest pause, the semicolon next, then the colon, and the full point terminating the sentence. The marks of interrogation and admiration were introduced many years after.^[3]

The standards and limitations of evolving technologies have exercised further pragmatic influences. For example, minimisation of punctuation in typewritten matter became economically desirable in the 1960s and 1970s for the many users of carbon-film ribbons, since a period or comma consumed the same length of expensive non-reusable ribbon as did a capital letter.

[edit] Conventional styles of English punctuation

There are two major styles of punctuation in English: American or Traditional punctuation; and British or Logical punctuation. These two styles differ mainly in the way in which they handle quotation marks.

[edit] Other languages

Other European languages 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, each "double punctuation", as the guillemet, requires a non-breaking space; in Russian it does not).

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 ano teleia (άνω τελεία).

Spanish 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.

Arabic, Urdu, and Persian languages—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 in the Devanagari script, started using the vertical bar (|) to end a line of prose and double vertical bars (||) in verse.

Texts in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean were left unpunctuated until the modern era. 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.

[edit] Novel punctuation marks

An international patent application was filed, and published in 1992 under WO number WO9219458,^[4] for two new punctuation marks: the "question comma" and the "exclamation comma." The patent application entered into national phase exclusively with Canada, advertised as lapsing in Australia on 27 January 1994^[5] and in Canada on 6 November 1995.^[6]

[edit] See also

• Hebrew punctuation
• James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher, a word puzzle in which proper punctuation must be added to give the sentence meaning
• Japanese punctuation
• Obelism, the practice of annotating manuscripts with marks set in the margins
• Scribal abbreviations, abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in Latin
• Terminal punctuation
• Tironian notes, a system of shorthand consisted of about 4,000 signs
• Unicode symbols, characters of symbols that have a well-defined place in plain text, in computing
• Usage

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Allen, Robert (2002-07-25). Punctuation. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-860439-4. 
• Amis, Kingsley (1998-03-02). The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-00-638746-2. 
• Fowler, Henry Watson; Francis George Fowler (June 2002) [1906]. The King's English. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-860507-2. 
• Gowers, Ernest (1948). Plain Words: a guide to the use of English. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office. 
• Parkes, Malcolm Beckwith (1993). Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07941-8. 

[edit] External links

Look up Punctuation in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of English in Use/Punctuation

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of English in Use/Other Common Punctuation Marks

• Larry Trask: Guide to Punctuation A helpful online resource
• Grammar, Punctuation, and Capitalization – a comprehensive online guide by NASA
• History of Punctuation, in French Helpful photographs of early punctuation
• Punctuation Marks in English: Clarity in Expression
• Unicode reference tables:
  • U2000PDF (137 KB) General Punctuation
  • U3000PDF (98.6 KB) CJK Symbols and Punctuation
  • UFE30PDF (65.4 KB) CJK Compatibility Forms
  • UFE50PDF (70.7 KB) Small Form Variants
  • UFF00PDF (204 KB) Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms
• Ethiopic Script