Where do all of our punctuation marks come from? How did we go from just these to all of these? Find out right now in another RobWords. Now, I’m going to start with something you perhaps weren’t expecting. This. This here is the space we leave between words because before we get onto the dots, dashes and squiggles, it’s worth a mention. We should not take these helpful little gaps that pace out our sentences for granted because they haven’t always been a given. Did you know Greeks didn’t use them? Their sentences were just one long string of letters. The Romans were just as bad. They experimented with putting dots between words for a bit but ditched that idea and went back to this interminable mess. All of this meant the Romans and Greeks were constantly having to reread things until they understood them. And what’s more, they would do so out loud, because they found that the rhythms of speech helped them with the deciphering. You know, historians believe that literate members of these two supreme cultures did all of their reading out loud mumbling along with the text like, I dunno, modern-day six-year-olds. The practice of reading quietly in your head isn’t thought to have been the norm until something like the 10th century. And only once English, Irish and German Christian scribes - sick to the gospels of impenetrable Latin prose - started putting spaces between the words. Hallelujah. But are spaces really punctuation? Yeah, well… let’s look at the word. Punctuation literally means “pointing” as in marking with a point. It's from the Latin for point, punct. And in fact, for several centuries we referred to punctuation as “pointing”. The word “punctuation” was reserved for the dots used to mark vowel sounds in Hebrew. But us starting to use the word punctuation for all manner of markings is one of many pretentious developments during the renaissance. So let’s do what those renaissance scholars would have bloomin’ loved to have done and go back in time to antiquity. More precisely to the famous Library of Alexandria because that’s where the story of our punctuation marks begins with a man called Aristophanes of Byzantium. In around the 2nd century BC, he proposed a system to solve the problem of the unreadability of Greek writing, which had really hit a low point. And actually, that’s precisely what he proposed: a low point. And a middle point. And a high point. Aristophanes put forward a system where dots would be used to mark in sentences where pauses of different lengths should occur. The middle one marked the shortest break. The bottom one, a little longer. And the top one, longer still. These were called comma, colon and periodos. Hmm, familiar, right? Seems like a game-changer, doesn’t it? Well no. The Romans had no interest in the idea and the practice died out. However, Hallelujah once more, because In the 6th century, Christian writers began to use punctuation again to help clarify their writings. They were much more keen on spreading their religion on paper than the pagan polytheists who came before them. You see, they’d written this book called the Bible, and it was like a bible to them and they wanted to leave minimal space for ambiguity when spreading the word of God. Punctuation was a great way to do that. So they reverted back to something very similar to Aristophanes’ system. However, instead of representing pauses, the dots played a grammatical role, which is what punctuation does to this day. The periodos - having been rechristened the distinctio finalis - was now the marker of the end of a sentence and the colon and comma broke the sentence up into clauses. So now we’re getting there, aren’t we? But then, a problem arose. These three points worked well with the consistent heights of Roman majuscule lettering - what we call capital or upper case today - but scribes had also started to write with lower case minuscule letters of different heights with tall stretchy bits and pendulous dangly bits. And suddenly it was less easy to tell whether a dot was at the bottom, at the top or somewhere in the middle. So the system all but falls apart, and just one of the dots survives. But that dot is with us now. It is the period or “full stop”, because that’s what it originally marked. Meanwhile, a new way of denoting a mid-sentence pause had emerged. It was called the virgule and was like a forward slash. However, over time it shrunk, gained a cute little curl and became our comma, named after Aristophanes’s original marker. Incidentally a comma is still called a virgule in French and a virgola in Italian. I bet I’ve said that wrong, sorry. Anyway, scholars from both countries played a huge part in all of this. So that’s the period/full stop and the comma covered. But what happened with the colon? And it’s half-sibling the semicolon? Well, the colon, despite sharing a name with one of Aristophanes’s OG pause markers, actually started out life as this: the punctus elevātus. It was originally used in the notation of Gregorian chants and it told whoever was doing the chanting - a monk, I guess - that they were supposed to both pause and change tone at this point hence the two elements to it. That pause was a medium-length pause and we now use a simplified version of it for something similar: at the start of a list or when further explanation is on the way. The semicolon originates in another similar looking symbol, the punctus versus or “facing mark”. It was used by mediaeval scribes to denote the end of a sentence and that usage hasn’t changed as much as you might think because very often you can just replace a semi-colon with a full stop and your writing still makes perfect sense. It’s quite common for people to struggle with the different uses of colons and semicolons these days. I think it’s partly because, despite the colon looking the more final of the two in my view - It just looks harder than a semi - it’s actually only the semicolon that can be replaced by a full stop. The semicolon joins two independent clauses. Here’s an example: The internet can be a dangerous place; it’s important to protect yourself online. You see, you could just as well write that as two sentences divided by a full stop. Meanwhile the colon introduces information set-up by what’s come before it. For example: Luckily, there is a solution: NordVPN, who have very kindly sponsored this video. NordVPN has all the benefits of a regular VPN and so much more. Yes, it’ll help you change your online location to protect your privacy and allow you to access streaming content from anywhere in the world but its Threat Protection Pro feature keeps you, your data and your money extra safe. It’ll scan any files you download for malware, direct you away from websites known for scamming people, and block harmful pop-ups. I have NordVPN switched on all the time. I researched this video at a cafe on an unsecured wifi network but NordVPN kept me safe from online snoopers. And I can have it on up to 10 devices. So use my special link nordvpn.com/robwordsvpn to get an exclusive deal with four extra months for free on the 2-year plan. There’s a 30-days money-back guarantee so just give it a go. Now, a huge question mark hangs over the origin of the question mark. But shall I start with the leading theory? It’s that our most charismatic of punctuation marks started out as this: the punctus interrogativus. Sounds promising, doesn’t it? I mean that literally means question mark. This guy came about around 12-hundred years ago, in the court of Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor. The earliest usage we know of is in documents like this one from old Charlie’s scriptorium in the beautiful city of Aachen. Check it out, it appears three times on this page alone, here, here and here. And in every case, it’s at the end of a question. You see that “quid”? That means “what?” in Latin. And what this ascending squiggly line over a dot is telling the reader - so whoever is singing or reciting these lines - to do is to raise their intonation, then stop. Which is what we do when we ask a question, right? So it seems pretty open and shut to me that that eventually becomes our question mark. The problem is we don’t have much evidence of the intermediate stages and there’s a big gap between those documents and it popping up elsewhere. However, the theory is still better than the alternatives, one of which is that the question mark started out life as an Egyptian hieroglyph of a cat’s tail. Cats apparently curl their tails when they’re curious about something. The Egyptians did love cats, but I couldn’t find that hieroglyph. Plus what’s the dot supposed to represent? Another more complete theory is that it’s formed from the first and last letters of the Latin word for “a question”, quaestio. Monks would sometimes save space by writing letters on top of one another like the squiggle on the top of some Ns in Spanish, the enye, started out as an N on top of an N. Anyway, the writing of that Q and O may have got sloppier and sloppier over time until we got to what we have now. But again, where’s the evidence of these intermediate phases? If you’ve got some, let me know. So I’m giving the boffins in Charlemagne’s scriptorium the credit for the question mark. However, the quaestio theory has one other thing going for it: It fits very neatly with the leading theory about another punctuation mark. The BANG! Also known as, the exclamation mark-slash-point. So it’s thought that this line over a dot started out as a line next to a circle, spelling out “IO!” which is itself a Latin exclamation. It could be used to suggest joy like “hurraaaay” or it could just draw attention to something, like “yo!” Yo! I can’t do that convincingly. Again, thrifty scribes wanting to save on paper supposedly started to put the i above the o, and that gradually simplified into something called the punctus admirativus or punctus exclamtivus, which becomes our exclamation mark-slash-point. I mentioned this is also called a “bang”