Punctuation

[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.

However, many Warring States period bamboo texts contain the symbols ⟨└⟩ and ⟨▄⟩ indicating the end of a chapter and full stop, respectively.

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 théseis system invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, where a single dot called a punctus was placed at one of several heights to denote rhetorical divisions in speech: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[12] 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.

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.

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.

[14] By the 19th century, punctuation in the Western world had evolved "to classify the marks hierarchically, in terms of weight".

[3] 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.

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 semicolon and a comma added, it reads as follows: Charles the First walked and talked; Half an hour after, his head was cut off.

[16] 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.

The full traditional set of typesetting tools became available with the advent of desktop publishing and more sophisticated word processors.

Informal text speak tends to drop punctuation when not needed, including some ways that would be considered errors in more formal writing.

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)[26] could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis.