Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. 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. 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 both obsolete and modern signs. By the 19th century, grammarians explained the difference between the punctuation marks by means of a hierarchy that ascribed different weight to them. Six marks, proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin, could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis. Sometimes, the meaning of a text can be changed substantially by using different punctuation, such as in "woman, without her man, is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of men to women), contrasted with "woman: without her, man is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of women to men). Similar changes in meaning can be achieved in spoken forms of most languages by using elements of speech such as suprasegmentals. The rules of punctuation vary with the language, location, register, and time. In online chat and text messages, punctuation is used tachygraphically, especially among younger users.
History
Western antiquity During antiquity, most scribes in the West wrote in scriptio continua, i.e., without punctuation delimiting word boundaries. 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:
hypostigmḗ – a low punctus on the baseline to mark off a komma (a unit smaller than a clause) stigmḕ mésē – a punctus at midheight to mark off a clause (kōlon) stigmḕ teleía – a high punctus to mark off a sentence (periodos) 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. During the 1st century BC, Romans also made occasional use of symbols to indicate pauses, but by the 4th century AD the Greek théseis—called distinctiones in Latin—prevailed, as reported by Aelius Donatus and Isidore of Seville (7th century). Latin texts were sometimes laid out per capitula, where each sentence was placed on its own 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 translated 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. 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 the comma positura, a 7-shaped mark (⁊, usually called the "Tironian et", equivalent to a modern ampersand), 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, marking a minor pause within the sentence, punctus elevatus, marking a major pause within the sentence, punctus versus, marking the end of a declarative sentence, and punctus interrogativus, marking the end of an interrogative sentence. 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). 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.
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