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
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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”
- hence this emphatic questioning symbol that never caught on is called the interrobang, It is an interrogative bang. Printers have lots of other nicknames
for the exclamation mark too. Among them apparently are “the screamer”,
“the gasper” and “the dog’s di-” I’m not saying that one. Whatever they’re called, one must be careful not to overuse them, lest one seem uncoolly
overenthusiastic or even out and out insane. F Scott Fitzgerald - author of the Great Gatsby
wasn’t a fan either - he said using one was “like laughing at your own joke”. Okay, what’s going on with these? Let’s talk about quotation marks next. Quotation marks are a funny
one. We still don’t seem to have made up our mind what to do with them. Should they come alone or in pairs,
face one another, be flipped over, sit on the ground, be pointy, curved or straight - all of those are used around Europe, by the way. Well, whatever your preference or preferences, they’re all thought to
originate in the same place. Meet this sharp-looking fellow. His name is diple, which is adorable and means
double in Ancient Greek. He’s so called because it
takes two lines to draw him. This symbol was used by librarians back
at the ancient Library of Alexandria again to flag up important sections of text. It was placed in the margin - here it
is being used on a Greek papyrus from the second or third century. Pretty cool right? It was also sometimes placed
at either end of the line. So it flagged up something important and for later Christian scholars “important”
very often meant a quote from the bible. So they start marking quotes from
the bible with these symbols. Then they start to use them to
mark out quotes from elsewhere. In the meantime, the printing press comes along and it becomes awkward to put
these chevrons in the margin. So they migrate into the body of
the text itself, neatly bookending - Is that a pun? If it is, excuse it. - these quotes. But another problem thrown up by the presses is that printers often didn’t
have a cute little diple to use, so they improvised drafting in
things like commas to use instead. But to mark them out from other commas they
inverted them - hence inverted commas - or doubled them or did both. Ta daaaa. A few European languages still mark out quotes with a double double diple -
so, a double double double. This system appears to have been
pioneered by a fella called Guillaume because they were named after him. Now these pairs of diple are rather
similar to angle brackets we sometimes use today or chevrons aren’t
they? So let’s go there next. Brackets or parentheses start to pop up in
manuscripts from the 14th century onwards. To start with, they are indeed pointy. But by the
16th century they have taken on a smoother shape. Here they are being somewhat
overused in that period. They’d smoothened sufficiently enough for the theologian Erasmus to coin
a darling new name for them. He described how asides could be marked out
with two little moons, which he called lunulae. Nowadays we have all kinds
of brackets to choose from but if you’re talking about medieval
manuscripts and using the word brackets, you’re actually most likely to be
referring to the curly whirly kind, which were scrawled all over old documents to help
direct the attention of readers to the right bits. But today, we most commonly use brackets when we
want to include an aside or something like that. The word parenthesis comes from
the Greek for “to put in beside”. It’s for squeezing in extra bits of information. But brackets aren’t the only
means through which we do this. You can use a pair of commas Or - if you really want to accentuate the
additional remark - you can use a pair of dashes. Now, this is a pretty new
invention from the 18th century. The hyphen though, which is like the dash but
shorter, has been around much much longer. It starts to show up in manuscripts
from the late 13th century to show where a word has been split between two
lines - just the same as we use it now. We also use the hyphen to either join together
two words or separate parts of a compound word I actually can’t quite get my head around
which of those it’s primarily doing. Who cares, I suppose, it’s
going to die out one day anyway. I mean, they’re all disappearing. But that usage relates nicely to what the
Greeks originally dubbed the “hyphen”. It was a little crescent that
they’d pop underneath a compound to show that it should be read as a single word. The word “hyphen” comes from the
Greek for “together” or “in one”. Another punctuation mark etymology that gives a clue to its original use
is that of the apostrophe. The apostrophe starts out life
as a medieval marker of omission, meaning it shows where something
has been left out of a word, a letter or a few letters. And the word apostrophe comes from
a Greek word meaning “to turn away”. The idea is that you have turned
away from part of the word. Incidentally, the word apostrophe also describes
a rhetorical device where someone turns away from their audience to address someone or something
else either present or otherwise or even dead like when Hamlet switches to addressing
the skull of the jester Yorrick: “Where be your gibes now?
Your gambols? Your songs?” He’s dead mate. Anyway we’re concerned with the
punctuation mark the apostrophe, which still marks where some letters have
been missed out, as it always has done. But we also have this curious
extra use of it to show possession. And the reason for this is really stupid. It’s the result of a misconception that
this is an abbreviation of the word “his” so that Mike’s house should be “Mike
his house” and you can actually find examples of that formulation being
used as a kind of overcorrection. It is rubbish though. In Old English you just stuck an S on the end of a noun to reference it belonging to
someone with no apostrophe needed. “Oh silly apostrophe, what are you doing there?” Right, next we shall go for… dot dot dot… ellipsis. An ellipsis - that trio of dots
- ultimately conveys silence for example, through a lapse,
a deliberate interruption, or because a writer doesn’t want
to bother you with a full quote. The use of ellipses is
primarily a dramatic device. They are all about the interruption of speech, so
it’s no surprise that they first appear in plays. One of the earliest examples of it is here, where it is actually a stream of
dashes and marks an interruption. This is from 1588, so during
Shakespeare’s lifetime. Why the three - or more - dots or dashes though? Well, one of the reasons will have been
that printers were just using what they had. And they had periods up the wazoo. And as for the writers themselves…
well isn’t there just something about these trailing dots that just
suggests things left unsaid? Ellipsis comes from the Greek for “to
come short” and ellipses are a great way of leaving someone wanting more. So let me attempt to do
exactly that by ending here. Thanks a lot for watching. If you’ve enjoyed
this video, I recommend watching this one next. And also, I’ve just created a load
of wordy nerdy tshirt designs. You should check those out
- I’ll leave a link below. And also, get on that big old NordVPN deal too. That’s all from me this time. Period. Full stop.