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]).