When exactly did punctuation come into use? I don’t see it in Greek or Roman inscriptions, and it doesn’t seem to appear in manusrcipts of the middle ages or early renaissance. Despite its relatively late (?) introduction, it seems to be pretty much uniform across the western languages. I believe the exception is modern Greek, which uses the semi-colon as a question mark is used in Latin scripts.
According to the Encyclopedia Americana: Marks equivalent to the period, semicolon and comma were introduced by a grammarian called Alexander of Byzantium in the third centrury B.C., but they were not of the modern form, and they were not consistently used. This and other non-standardized systems of punctuation were used through the Middle Ages.
Standardization of punctuation owes a lot to the invention of the printing press. Gutenberg used periods, colons, and commas, but I’m not sure if they were of the modern form. The biggest step in standarization came from an Italian printer named Aldus Manutius a few decades after Gutenberg first published his Bible. Manutius used the modern forms of the question mark, period, comma, semicolon and colon. The other marks, including the dash, exclamation point, and quotation marks, were introduced over the next couple of centuries.
Thanks!
Are there other cultures or writing systems that use different systems such as the Greek use of the semicolon for a question mark?
How different does it need to be?
Two quick possibilities:
German uses different punctuation from English. The two that spring to mind are quotation marks (German open quotes look like double commas, German close quotes look like English open quotes) and numeral punctuation (German uses a comma where English uses a decimal and periods where English uses commas).
Spanish has that inverted question mark and exclamation point thing going on. My German teacher had a none-too-charitable explanation for this which I won’t burden you all with. 