Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood.[1] 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.[2][further explanation needed] 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 the other, historically or currently used, signs.
By the 19th century, the punctuation marks were used hierarchically in terms of their weight.[3] Six marks, proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin, could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis.[4]
Meaning of a text can be changed substantially, although in rare cases, with different punctuation, such as in "woman, without her man, is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of men to women), when written "woman: without her, man is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of women to men), instead.[5] Similar change in meaning can be achieved in spoken forms of most languages by using various elements of speech; such as, suprasegmentals. The rules of punctuation vary with language, location, register, and time. Most recently, in online chat and text messages punctuation is used mostly tachygraphically, especially among younger users.
History
Punctuation marks, especially spacing, were not needed in logographic or syllabic (such as 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.[6] By the Song dynasty, the addition of punctuation to texts by scholars to aid comprehension became common.[7]
Western Antiquity
Most texts were still written in scriptura continua, that is without any separation between words. However, the Greeks were sporadically using punctuation marks consisting of vertically arranged dots—usually two (dicolon) or three (tricolon)—in around the 5th century BC as an aid in the oral delivery of texts. After 200 BC, the Greeks used Aristophanes of Byzantium's system (called théseis) of a single dot (punctus) placed at varying heights to mark up speeches at rhetorical divisions:
hypostigmḗ – a low punctus on the baseline to mark off a komma (unit smaller than a clause);
stigmḕ mésē – a punctus at midheight to mark off a clause (kōlon); and
stigmḕ teleía – a high punctus to mark off a sentence (periodos).[8]
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.
The Romans (c.1st century BC) also occasionally used symbols to indicate pauses, but the Greek théseis—under the name distinctiones[9]—prevailed by the 4th century AD as reported by Aelius Donatus and Isidore of Seville (7th century). Also, texts were sometimes laid out per capitula, where every sentence had its own separate 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 copyists 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 (c.AD 400), 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 and Anglo-Saxon scribes, whose native languages were not derived from Latin, added more visual cues to render texts more intelligible. Irish scribes introduced the practice of word separation.[10] 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 France 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,[11]punctus versus, and punctus interrogativus, but 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).[12]
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.
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 question marks as punctuation. The focus of punctuation still was rhetorical, to aid reading aloud.[13] 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."[14] 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.[15]
By the 19th century, punctuation in the Western world had evolved "to classify the marks hierarchically, in terms of weight".[16] Cecil Hartley's poem identifies their relative values:
The stop point out, with truth, the time of pause A sentence doth require at ev'ry clause. At ev'ry comma, stop while one you count; At semicolon, two is the amount; A colon doth require the time of three; The period four, as learned men agree.[17]
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:
With a semi-colon and a comma added, it reads as follows:
Charles the First walked and talked; Half an hour after, his head was cut off.[18]
In a 19th-century manual of typography, Thomas MacKellar writes:
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.[19]
Typewriters and electronic communication
The introduction of electrical telegraphy with a limited set of transmission codes[20] and typewriters with a limited set of keys influenced punctuation subtly. For example, curved quotes and apostrophes 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 monospaced. 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 teleprinters 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 word processors. 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 URLs. 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.
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.[21][further explanation needed] The serial comma is used much more often in the United States than in the UK.
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. 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).
In Georgian, three dots ⟨჻⟩ were formerly used as a sentence or paragraph divider. It is still sometimes used in calligraphy.
Spanish 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.[24]
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—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 ⟨?⟩.[25]
Originally, Sanskrit had no punctuation. In the 17th century, Sanskrit and Marathi, 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, Japanese, Korean and VietnameseChu Nom 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.[26] 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 could be a remnant of the British Raj. Another punctuation 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, Khmer, Lao and Burmese 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.
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.[27] Nevertheless, it and its inverted form were given code points in Unicode: U+203D‽INTERROBANG, U+2E18⸘INVERTED INTERROBANG.
Predecessors of emoticons and emojis
The six additional punctuation marks proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin in his book Plumons l'Oiseau ("Let's pluck the bird", 1966)[28] could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis.
the "irony point" or "irony mark" (point d'ironie: )
the "love point" (point d'amour: ) A point d'amour mark, or "love point"
the "conviction point" (point de conviction: )
the "authority point" (point d'autorité: )
the "acclamation point" (point d'acclamation: )
the "doubt point" (point de doute: )
"Question comma", "exclamation comma"
An exclamation comma
An international patent application was filed, and published in 1992 under World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) number WO9219458,[30] 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[31] and in Canada on 6 November 1995.[32]
Snark mark, indicating an ironic statement by putting a tilde next to terminal punctuation: .~ for dry sarcasm, !~ for enthusiastic sarcasm, and ?~ for sarcastic questions
The comma, is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline of the text. Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight, but inclined from the vertical. Other fonts give it the appearance of a miniature filled-in figure 9 on the baseline.
The colon, :, is a punctuation mark consisting of two equally sized dots aligned vertically. A colon often precedes an explanation, a list, or a quoted sentence. It is also used between hours and minutes in time, between certain elements in medical journal citations, between chapter and verse in Bible citations, and, in the US, for salutations in business letters and other formal letter writing.
The question mark? is a punctuation mark that indicates a question or interrogative clause or phrase in many languages.
In English writing, quotation marks or inverted commas, also known informally as quotes, talking marks, speech marks, quote marks, quotemarks or speechmarks, are punctuation marks placed on either side of a word or phrase in order to identify it as a quotation, direct speech or a literal title or name. Quotation marks may be used to indicate that the meaning of the word or phrase they surround should be taken to be different from that typically associated with it, and are often used in this way to express irony. They are also sometimes used to emphasise a word or phrase, although this is usually considered incorrect.
The semicolon; is a symbol commonly used as orthographic punctuation. In the English language, a semicolon is most commonly used to link two independent clauses that are closely related in thought, such as when restating the preceding idea with a different expression. When a semicolon joins two or more ideas in one sentence, those ideas are then given equal rank. Semicolons can also be used in place of commas to separate items in a list, particularly when the elements of the list themselves have embedded commas.
In writing, a space is a blank area that separates words, sentences, syllables and other written or printed glyphs (characters). Conventions for spacing vary among languages, and in some languages the spacing rules are complex. Inter-word spaces ease the reader's task of identifying words, and avoid outright ambiguities such as "now here" vs. "nowhere". They also provide convenient guides for where a human or program may start new lines.
The interrobang, also known as the interabang‽, is an unconventional punctuation mark intended to combine the functions of the question mark and the exclamation mark. The glyph is a ligature of these two marks and was first proposed in 1962 by Martin K. Speckter.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation is a non-fiction book written by Lynne Truss, the former host of BBC Radio 4's Cutting a Dash programme. In the book, published in 2003, Truss bemoans the state of punctuation in the United Kingdom and the United States and describes how rules are being relaxed in today's society. Her goal is to remind readers of the importance of punctuation in the English language by mixing humour and instruction.
Punctuation marks are one or two part graphical marks used in writing, denoting tonal progress, pauses, sentence type, abbreviations, et cetera.
Irony punctuation is any form of notation proposed or used to denote irony or sarcasm in text. Written text, in English and other languages, lacks a standard way to mark irony, and several forms of punctuation have been proposed to fill the gap. The oldest is the percontation point in the form of a reversed question mark, proposed by English printer Henry Denham in the 1580s for marking rhetorical questions, which can be a form of irony. Specific irony marks have also been proposed, such as in the form of an open upward arrow, used by Marcellin Jobard in the 19th century, and in a form resembling a reversed question mark, proposed by French poet Alcanter de Brahm during the 19th century.
The orthography of the Greek language ultimately has its roots in the adoption of the Greek alphabet in the 9th century BC. Some time prior to that, one early form of Greek, Mycenaean, was written in Linear B, although there was a lapse of several centuries between the time Mycenaean stopped being written and the time when the Greek alphabet came into use.
Quotation marks are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to identify direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same glyph. Quotation marks have a variety of forms in different languages and in different media.
The exclamation mark(!) is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or to show emphasis. The exclamation mark often marks the end of a sentence, for example: "Watch out!" Similarly, a bare exclamation mark is often used in warning signs. The exclamation mark is often used in writing to make a character seem as though they are shouting, excited, or surprised.
Japanese punctuation includes various written marks, which differ from those found in European languages, as well as some not used in formal Japanese writing but frequently found in more casual writing, such as exclamation and question marks.
Writing systems that use Chinese characters also include various punctuation marks, derived from both Chinese and Western sources. Historically, judou annotations were often used to indicate the boundaries of sentences and clauses in text. The use of punctuation in written Chinese only became mandatory during the 20th century, due to Western influence. Unlike modern punctuation, judou marks were added by scholars for pedagogical purposes and were not viewed as integral to the text. Texts were therefore generally transmitted without judou. In most cases, this practice did not interfere with the interpretation of a text, although it occasionally resulted in ambiguity.
Hebrew punctuation is similar to that of English and other Western languages, Modern Hebrew having imported additional punctuation marks from these languages in order to avoid the ambiguities sometimes occasioned by the relative lack of such symbols in Biblical Hebrew.
For the Korean language, South Korea mainly uses a combination of East Asian and European punctuation, while North Korea uses a little more of the East Asian punctuation style.
The full stop, period, or full point. is a punctuation mark used for several purposes, most often to mark the end of a declarative sentence.
Punctuation in the English language helps the reader to understand a sentence through visual means other than just the letters of the alphabet. English punctuation has two complementary aspects: phonological punctuation, linked to how the sentence can be read aloud, particularly to pausing; and grammatical punctuation, linked to the structure of the sentence. In popular discussion of language, incorrect punctuation is often seen as an indication of lack of education and of a decline of standards.
The compound point is an obsolete typographical construction. Keith Houston reported that this form of punctuation doubling, which involved the comma dash (,—), the semicolon dash (;—), the colon dash, or "dog's bollocks" (:—), and less often the stop-dash (.—) arose in the seventeenth century, citing examples from as early as 1622. More traditionally, these paired forms of punctuation seem most often to have been called (generically) compound points and (specifically) semicolon dash, comma dash, colon dash, and point dash.
↑ 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.) ISBN957-520-111-6.
↑ 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).
↑ E. Otha Wingo, Latin Punctuation in the Classical Age (The Hague, Netherlands: De Gruyter, 1972), 22.
↑ The Latin names for the marks: subdistinctio, media distinctio, and distinctio.
↑ Parkes, M. B. (1991). "The Contribution of Insular Scribes of the Seventh and Eighth Centuries to the 'Grammar of Legibility'". Scribes, Scripts and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation and Dissemination of Medieval Texts. London: Hambledon Press. pp.1–18.
↑ MacKellar, Thomas (1885). The American Printer: A Manual of Typography, Containing Practical Directions for Managing all Departments of a Printing Office, As Well as Complete Instructions for Apprentices: With Several Useful Tables, Numerous Schemes for Imposing Forms in Every Variety, Hints to Authors, Etc (Fifteenth – Revised and Enlargeded.). Philadelphia: MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan. p.63.
Houston, Keith (2013). Shady Characters: Ampersands, Interrobangs and other Typographical Curiosities. Particular.
Parkes, Malcolm Beckwith (1993). Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West. University of California Press. ISBN0-520-07941-8.
Patt, Sebastian (2013). Punctuation as a Means of Medium-Dependent Presentation Structure in English: Exploring the Guide Functions of Punctuation. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. ISBN978-3-8233-6753-6.
External links
Look up Punctuation in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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