Who invented punctuation marks?
Did they, or some of them, exist before Gutenberg ?
(Wikipedia doesn’t say anything about their origin. I also searched this forum and Google, no luck)
Wikipedia does seem to give a brief history if you look up the individual marks. It doesn’t have anything for the period for instance, but the question mark and semicolon are covered.
For instance.
Is the term “period” only relevant to the US though? Isn’t “.” better known as a full stop?
I understand that many of the more famous punctuation marks were originally words.
The exclamation mark, for instance, was an I over O, literally “Yo!” (or it’s archaic equivalent anyway).
The Ampersand was originally (and in some fonts still resembles) an “Et”, which literally means “and”.
I forget how the percent symbol(s) worked, but it was something straightforward like that.
That means the first suggestion above for the question mark is almost certainly correct. And, really, cat tail with an anus?!? I removed that nonsense from Wikipedia, but what the heck is wrong with people over there?
Not really punctuation, but the ‘=’ sign was invented by mathematician Robert Recorde in 1557 because he was tired of writing ‘is equal to’ all the time.
Punctuation marks are simply a way to make reading easier. As printing became widespread, so did formats and punctuation. Of course it was not a smooth process. Nobody sat down on a Thursday and invented the system we have now.
So yes, moveable type was an important milestone in punctuation, but not exactly the beginning as as punctuation was used in written texts well before then. But back then, there were no real rules.
Does that help in the least? Perhaps you would enjoy the very readable book on punctuation Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. Well worth your time.
One should also note that–besides the marks used in traditional punctuation–placing spaces between words is itself a form of punctuation. Most ancient inscriptions written in lettered scripts ran all the words together; the latin verb legere = “to read” also means “to pick out or choose” (root of English words like collect, elect, select) because you literally had to pick out the words from a stream of letters. Later Roman inscriptions (e.g. the Arch of Constantine) would sometimes use a raised dot between words.
Speaking of punctuation marks . . .
I think the widespread use, at least, of a lot of punctuation (spaces, full-stops, question marks) all dates to the Carolingian writing reform ca 800 or so. No specifics in my head, though.
I have an audio book from the woman who wrote Eats Shoots and Leaves, and she contends that many punctuation marks were invented to help actors in plays learn their lines. This is supposedly the origin of periods and commas. The comma orginally came in high, middle, and low versions. I think the placement of the comma was supposed to denote inflection. The high comma survives as the apostrophe (’), although it isn’t used like a comma anymore.
It’s surprising that so little has been said about those signs we use everyday. Eats shoots and leaves seems to be THE book to get. The title however doesn’t say much about punctuation!
Thanks everyone.
The title is actually Eats, Shoots & Leaves*, of course referring to an old punctuation based joke. Without the comma in the title, the phrase means something quite different than with.
Even more direct when the subtitle is included as well: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.