Transcript for:
History and Evolution of Punctuation Marks

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” 

  • 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.