Meant to post this query a few months back but never got around to it. But, the interrobang thread reminded me. So, I was wondering, how did we arrive at the period, question mark, exclamation mark, etc.? I've researched the development of the letters and alphabet, but never the punctuation marks. Can anybody help? The TsuwmMeister, perhaps?
I went to AskJeeves, and found this absolutely fascinating page:
http://www.rain.org/~mkummel/stumpers/15feb02a.html(Note: patience is definitely not one of my virtues. I really dislike the wait involved when I have to go through makeashorterlink or that snurl thing. However...sigh...if this link makes anybody's page go wide, I'll cave.)
Fascinating, Jackie! Thanks! You certainly struck gold here. So the Greeks first introduced periods as "points" to designate breaks in the written language, and these evolved into commas as well. And I loved this about the spaces between words, which, until this moment, I never really contemplated before:
> The next step in this evolution of writing occured in the late middle ages when Monastic Irish scribes first started adding spaces between words in their scriptural manuscripts. It's fascinating that this innovation that makes silent reading possible happened in Ireland. Latin was a second language for everyone by this time so maybe they needed the extra help of the spaces to parse Latin texts into words. Paul Saenger wrote an entire book on Space Between Words, The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, 1997). He comments that "people at the frontiers have always been more open to linguistic innovation and combining things in new ways." By the twelfth century, the practice was universal in Europe. It was a revolutionary change that helped bring literacy and independent thinking to the masses.
"The ancient world did not possess the desire, characteristic of the modern age, to make reading easier and swifter. Those who read... were not interested in the swift intrusive consultation of books... The notion that the greater portion of the population should be autonomous and self-motivated readers was entirely foreign to the elitist literate mentality of the ancient world."
Standards for spelling and punctuation didn't appear until after the printing press. I still have trouble with commas and hyphens and words like "on to" and "onto"! <
Now, I'm wondering how, upon the advent of printing, they arrived at the form of the question and exclamation mark, quotation marks, and colon and semi-colon. (not to mention asterisks, parentheses [and brackets]).
And I wonder, did they have arguments about grammar when most people didn't write? It's harder to accuse someone of a run-on sentence when they're just speaking it. When did rules such as "each sentence must have a subject and a predicate" come about? We use "illegal" sentences all the time in casual speech, so it seems like that might've come after they'd worked out what a sentence is and how to separate it from its neighbours.
I don't think all other languages have the same problem with run-on sentances that we have in English. One thing I found difficult about Spanish (there were a few things but...) was that many of the sentances were long enough that I would forget the meaning of the first half by the time I had decoded the second. There would be clauses within clauses piggy-backed onto other clauses. Anyone know about other languages?
In Korean, the verb comes at the end of the sentence which, in a complex sentence, leaves one to consider all manner of modifying clauses and phrases, before finding out what the hell is happening!
before finding out what the hell is happening!
yeah, that helps explain their diplomacy :)
In reply to:
And I wonder, did they have arguments about grammar when most people didn't write?
I looked up soloikismos and soloikizo, the origins of our word solecism. The LSJ entry for soloikismos http://makeashorterlink.com/?C54F241B5 tells us that a solecism is a grammatical mistake, while a barbarism (barbarismos) is a misuse of words. One of the earlies uses of soloikizo (commit solecims) comes from Herodotus, where he tells us that the Sauromatae speak Scythian (not a written language) but with many solecisms.http://makeashorterlink.com/?O38F121B5
While googling for solecism I found this, which at first glance looks fascinating, if somewhat irrelevant:
http://makeashorterlink.com/?O38F121B5
Bingley
Ya know, we're gone have problems finding a lot of written evidence of complaints about bad grammar from non-literate peoples.
written evidence of complaints about bad grammar from non-literate peoples.
Apparently one of the Dead Sea Scrawls features a Major Major.... (ICLIU)
:)
