Punctuation

Writing has been around in some form for at least 5200 years. These earliest systems were pictographic, with little symbolic drawings coming to represent more complex ideas, and eventually individual words.

I have a strong conviction that this leap from art to writing is a serious contender for our most important invention, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to envision how it might have happened. Meanwhile, archaeologists and historians keep unearthing new discoveries that help us paint a more complete picture of our distant past.

This leap was made independently in a few different areas of the world, including Egypt, Sumer, and China on the Eurasian land mass and the Maya in the Americas. And, as huge as this was for all of the pertaining civilizations (and for human progress as a whole), I want to focus on something that happened along the way to where we are today.

First, there was the journey into abstraction. What I mean is that these ancient scribes would draw something like a bird, and that symbol would then only mean “bird.” At some point, the writers started to mean something different, so maybe that bird symbol came to mean something beyond just the image of a bird. Now, it meant the word “up”, and any time you wanted to use that concept, you could just draw a little bird instead.

Then, using even more abstraction, people began to use phonemes, or pieces of words that could be represented by symbols. Let’s make up an example of how this might work with our little bird drawing, a pictogram that now represents the concept of “up” or “upwards” or “high.” A new pictogram might combine a drawing of a bird with a drawing of a hat, which might represent a ruler, especially if you imagine that the hat the king or queen wears is “up there.” “Up hat” might come to mean “crown”, which could then become “ruler” over time.

Gradually, symbols became abstracted to mean words, and then they were abstracted even further into syllable chunks you could put together—those phonemes we just discussed. Finally, something like an alphabet formed, although it was properly called an abjad, but it was a short step toward an alphabet from here. I wrote a bit about this here, in case you want to open it in a new tab to read later:

Even with the alphabet, you still had some pretty serious issues, and that’s where I want to focus for the rest of today. For starters, try reading the following sentence and seeing if it makes sense. leaveacommentbelowifyoufindthisprettyeasytoreadbutthisisprettymuchhowalllanguageworkedbackinthedayasthekidscallitasasidenoteireallyappreciatepunctuationwhenimwriting

It probably does make sense, but you also have to read it really slowly. Now, imagine there were some names or less common words thrown in there, and you can get an idea of the mess scholars and scribes were in, especially if money was on the line, as it frequently was with anything written back then.

It was in Ancient Greece where our modern system of punctuation began in earnest. The Greeks used scripto continua, just like that sentence I wrote without any punctuation whatsoever. Some 2300 years ago, Aristophanes of Byzantium, who was a librarian in Alexandria, had become annoyed by this problem: people would try to read out loud, the way most reading was done back then, and nobody knew when to pause between words or sentences.

Aristophanes introduced the idea of putting little dots in between words, so it was obvious where to pause when speaking. If this idea of a little dot sounds a lot like today’s sentence-ending period, that’s because it’s exactly where that came from, full stop.

Aristophanes was even more clever: his system prescribed marking those dots at three different heights in order to indicate a different type of punctuation. Today, we call this style Greek punctuation or Aristophanean punctuation. The longest pauses, like today’s sentences, were placed at the top between words. Something like a colon or em dash—like this—would be represented by a dot somewhere in the middle, and a dot down low meant a comma.

The Romans didn’t love all these dots, so they came up with a forward slash to represent the shortest of those pauses. That forward slash became this symbol, the comma, after being copied a kajillion-jillion times.

Then, Irish and Scottish monks who were tired of trying to figure out when to pause between words (not just sentences or longer pauses like commas). They came up with a little visual space between each of the words, which is actually contrary to how we speak… but ever since the Ancient Greeks, we’ve been slowly and steadily separating the written word form the spoken word.

Everything was read aloud back then, but monasteries were generally very quiet places, and monks liked to think about what they were copying as they went along. It helped them to make fewer copying mistakes, so helping to preserve the original meaning at times.

From the Greeks to the Romans to the Irish and Scottish monks, punctuation began to slide into our written language, and it’s hard to imagine writing today without these incredible tools. There were other notable steps toward standardization, like Charlemagne declaring a standard alphabet, which introduced lowercase letters, and the question mark, which is a fascinating story for another day.

I’m winding down this rap for today, but I’ll have more to say about the evolution of these marks over time, and how their use has evolved our thinking. Modern punctuation continues to evolve, like the overuse of ellipses… or the generally incorrect use of ellipses…