Where Did Punctuation Come From?

Defining punctuation and spaces

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1:07Hello. I've decided that when I'm writing informally on texts or on social media, I punctuate my writing with unorthodox punctuation marks. Nothing wild or original or clever, just changes and adaptations of the regular punctuation marks that I learnt at school. So an obvious one. I do multiple question marks. I might write, really, plus three question marks. This, I guess, is supposed to indicate great incredulity on my part,

1:38as if I'm saying, really? On occasions, I might even reply to someone in my family or post on social media with the three question marks on their own, with no word coming before it. This means, or at least I think it means, do you honestly and truly mean what you just said? Another bit of intensifying I do is with ellipses. Traditionally and strictly, this is three full stops, dot, dot, dot, as we say, indicating something incomplete or that there's some kind of suspense involved.

2:11But I think, what if I want to intensify that sense of what do you think happens next? Well, I add some more full stops, maybe taking it to six or seven. Quite often, these are in texts about football with my sons. It's a writing environment that seems to favour extreme, intense, brief messages and thoughts. I notice also about myself that I'm a very liberal user of the forward slash, the one meaning or. In fact, the little phrase, and slash or, has become a vital part of my way of

2:46thinking. Then there's the perennial problem of how to indicate the ironic question. I think whole books have been written about this with passionate advocates for a new punctuation mark. Like many other people, I do the question mark, exclamation mark, straight after each other. I'm happy, question mark, exclamation mark. In 1962, someone called Martin K. Spector combined the two, one placed over the other and called it the interrobang. I tend not to use it though.

3:18Punctuation is pernickety. Pernickety punctuation. Oh, that could be the title of the book we're looking at today. In fact, it's called On the Mark, a history of punctuation from ancient Egypt to the emoticon. And its author is Florence Hazrat. Welcome back to Word of Mouth, Florence. Hi, Michael. Thank you for having you back and talking about punctuation again. Yes, well, I think we'd better begin with your thoughts on what is or is not punctuation. Punctuation is anything that you've mentioned, this repertoire that we all know, dot, dot, dot,

3:49a comma, a colon, dash, the forward slash, for example, as well. So anything that is a mark in text that's not a letter. So anything that's not alphabetical. And also, I would put forward, expand the definition of punctuation. So, for example, capital letters or boldface or italic or even white space, a paragraph line, for example. It's about structure. It's about emotional or vocal tone, for example. And it's about the grammatical information of the sentence of the text as a whole.

4:22Now, you mentioned there spacing between words. That might surprise people. They may not think of that as punctuation. So we've got spacing between words. We sometimes have spacing between paragraphs and we have double spacing. Do they all count for you as punctuation? Yes, absolutely. So if we think about punctuation as something that helps us making sense of text, then space would definitely be among this as well. Because we have to imagine that in ancient Greece, for example, or ancient Rome, text didn't actually have spaces between the words. And this is a little

4:55bit difficult for us to really get how significant then space is and why they did that. Because for us to mark the beginning and the end of a word seems so inevitable. And scholars are kind of divided why ancient Greece and ancient Latin didn't have these spaces between the words. And they say it, perhaps it's that people didn't think of text as different from speech. Perhaps they thought we are just recording speech. And when we speak, we actually pause a tiny, tiny bit between words, but we don't do it

5:28consciously. So perhaps people back then, you know, your Cicero, for example, they thought, okay, that's just one flow of speech. And text is speech that we record. So they didn't put any spaces between words. But that makes reading quite hard, you would have to be quite educated and have time to pore over a text. We think of print as democratic, we want everybody to be able to read it. But I don't think the Romans and Greeks were that bothered, were they? No, not at all. You know, you have a Cicero who is a politician, and he is a writer, and he's one of the

6:01most important people. He would be offended if he had a text that was punctuated, because he would think, why are you giving me a text that's punctuated? I don't need that. That's for inexperienced readers. That's maybe even for readers whose native language is not Latin. How dare you? Or even slaves. Or even slaves. Jove forbid. Or women, can you imagine? Oh. So in those times, reading really was for this elite cast of people. And they also thought that your writing should be good enough to not need any punctuation. If you can't write Latin in such a

6:40clear way that it becomes clear where the sentence is from your rhythm and from your natural feeling for the language, perhaps you shouldn't be writing anything at all.

Ancient Alexandria and dots

6:49Can you give us a sense of when people thought, let's start putting some signs in order to break up the language and give us different tones and so on? When does it all get going? So actually, in ancient Alexandria, so like Greek-influenced Egypt, this amazing library developed, the Library of Alexandria, with half a million scrolls and all of these scholars from all over the world coming and studying together and reading these texts together. And the librarians there noticed that their non-native Greek speakers had trouble because they were non-natives.

7:23They were scholars, but they didn't have Greek as their native language. And so they started to invent punctuation and other kinds of signs to help these non-native Greek speakers along. And one of these librarians was Aristophanes of Byzantium around 200 BC, who included dots at different levels of the line to mark where a sentence starts and ends, and then two medial pauses, a bit like a comma and a colon, we could maybe think of them. The dot is so perfect for that because it's tiny. You can just squeeze it in between words and it

7:59doesn't take up extra space. So it was a really genius move on the side of Aristophanes. And these dots at the different levels of the line, just to even mark the very basic shape of a sentence, that trickled into grammars. And then school children started to learn about this. And so slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, we have the spread of marking at least, you know, some very basic grammar. What comes after dots? After dots, we certainly have spaces, actually.

8:29Ah, yes. Yes. Finally, we get there. And that happened around the 7th century in far-flung Ireland, where a group of monks, whose native language is Irish, and they're copying out the Bible in Latin. And in order to make no mistakes, they started to put the Irish words above the Latin. So they were passing the languages. And then in order to be very, very sure that every Irish word is above the Latin word, they started to introduce these tiny spaces between words. And Ireland at the time

9:02was really also at the forefront of manuscript manipulation and trying to change the design and improve the design of the layout of the text and make it more readable. And so we have these Irish manuscripts that then start to go back to the continent. And there they were picked up by Emperor Charlemagne in his educational reform. And that's how spaces started to spread all across

Chaucer and oral performance

9:29Europe.

Chaucer and oral performance

9:30Fascinating. Now, one manuscript that I'm fond of looking at online is the Hengert manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales from around 1400. Now, you mentioned this in your book that someone called Adam Pinkhurst, I rather like the sound of him, was the scribe in question. Now, scholars say that his punctuation marks are designed to help with the oral delivery of the poems. These feel to me like looking at a page of writing by a performance poet, marked up with forward slashes for when to pause

10:00and even when to breathe. Now, this seems to me very different from how we use punctuation marks like commas and full stops, which we nearly always use as ends of grammatical sequences now, like phrases, clauses and sentences. So there was a time in that manuscript, it does excite me actually, where it's for oral performance rather than for grammar. Yes, that's true, probably because people were probably reading together. They were reading Chaucer out or they were reading stories out, sitting together, which we don't necessarily do anymore. So that

10:36time was probably much more of an oral culture. However, at the same time, I think that even today, we use punctuation in a more elocutionary way. So somebody who uses a bit more punctuation, such as me, I would put more commas in a sentence because I want my readers to pause where I would maybe breathe. And I want to create this effect of conversation that we're sitting together. So I think punctuation has potentially from the start been both a creature of sound and a creature

11:10of text and looking and grammar and grammar. Exactly. Yeah. OK, so let's talk about some individual punctuation marks, ones we haven't really got into and get a sense of when they emerged. I haven't really got a sense of when the comma, for example, we've talked about it, but when did the comma suddenly or did it suddenly appear or did it evolve? It did evolve from the virgule. So that is the forward slash. In the 13th century or so in Italy, there was a scholar called Buon Compagno da

11:43Signia. Great name for a punctuation person. Signia, meaning sign, presumably. Exactly. And he just did away with these different dots at different lines. He said, we just need a kind of stroke at the end of a line, a horizontal stroke, and then a vertical stroke to say, here is a pause and here's the end of a sentence. And then this forward slash at some point became this beautiful curvy comma that we have today in the later Renaissance in Italy in the late 15th century or so. So this is after the

12:15invention of printing. Yes. And the forward slash actually stuck around and it's super interesting to look at English text from maybe 1530s or 1550s because something that was printed in English would potentially have the forward slash and also be in black letter. So that looks like Gothic printing that we see in old German. Yes, exactly. So this native language would be printed with the simplified punctuation and with this other script. And then Latin or Italian would be printed in what then

12:48became Times New Roman and also have this modern Italian curvy beautiful comma. And so even through punctuation we can see these different languages being represented in a different way, being thought about in a different way and potentially sometimes even competing. Printing was extremely important for the spread of punctuation and printers themselves. For example, Aldo Manuzio, who was a Venetian printer in the late 15th century, he invented the semicolon. He was working with Pietro Bembo, who was a cardinal

13:20slash writer, and they felt that they needed another sign for more nuanced pausing. And the Renaissance really gives us this bloom of punctuation, both the English and the Italian Renaissance, where writers wanted writing to do more, to say more than just grammar, for example. They wanted the pauses there, they wanted the hesitation, they wanted the interruptions of speech, for example. And so they started to invent new punctuation marks. And so Aldo Manuzio cut this mark, the semicolon, with the

13:52full stop in the middle and then the comma at the bottom. Nobody really knows how to use it. I love that about it. I think it's quite a flexible, ambiguous mark that helps us think. On the one hand, it can sort of mean what you want it to mean. On the other hand, you know, we can't just use it as a replacement for the question mark, for example, right? It is something to do about pausing, it is something to do about parallelism and language, I think. So it makes sense that you would be using it for a list of sorts, maybe a list of similar clauses rather than nouns. I do believe that the

14:25semicolon allows us to be meandering a little bit and to potentially reflect associative thought. And did these clever Italians invent the colon as well? I guess in some ways, yes. Although in the Renaissance, the colon was used in different ways potentially than it is today, because their grammar education was much more profound and long and complicated than ours. They thought of a sentence as something like a palace, something like, you know, an architectural wonder. So the sentence was much longer, it had different clauses.

15:01So a colon at that time would be between two grammatical parts that we don't necessarily have access to anymore. So sometimes I struggle explaining things or talking about punctuation with people because we use the same words, but they don't necessarily mean the same thing. Yes, I see that. I've seen Renaissance Italian texts. It's a different way of thinking of language. We don't have and which and the which and when and where and why all in one sentence. We say, well, just start another sentence with this. So just use the full stop. Now, what about

Quotation marks and parentheses

15:33speech marks, quotation marks? When do they first appear? Oh, that's one of my favourite topics. Good. I like quote marks. They go back to Alexandria as well, actually. Oh, really? Yes. One of the tasks of these librarians or this library was to collect texts and to collect texts of the Odyssey, for example, as well. These librarians would also come up with signs to say, for example, this is a repeated line. Maybe we should take it out because they were dealing with a lot of different manuscripts and they were trying to find a version that was most closest to the original,

16:08most correct. So they started to invent signs like the asterisk, for example, for a line that is probably faulty, but they didn't want to kick it out just yet. And so they also included a sign kind of it's called a carrot. It's like a V shape, but horizontal. Yeah. The kind of shape we use sometimes around email addresses. Yeah, exactly. And that would be called a dipple. And they would put that in the margins to say, here is something noteworthy going on. And later, after Christianisation, writers would use this in

16:43order to mark quotations from the Bible. And many centuries later, then these signs became quotations because they used to be quotations from the Bible, right? And at some point they doubled rather than to just have one. We have two, which is the French guimée, the French quotation marks nowadays. But in English, they, again, at some point, and we don't really know when, but by the beginning of the 16th century, they would be erect. So they write it themselves and then they would go up.

17:15And then they, even throughout the 16th century and Shakespeare's time, they would be marking, not necessarily speech, but again, something noteworthy going on or when somebody is speaking. So we have the sort of double life of a quotation and also something noteworthy going on, like a proverb, for example, something like, hey, look at this, there's special language here. And then we have sometime in the 18th century that they really just refer to quotations. I'm a prolific user of brackets, the parentheses. Some say overly prolific. So if I wanted an aside,

17:48because I'm used to performing and I do aside. So when I'm writing, I do these asides in brackets, it's in parentheses. What's your view of that? Are you going to tell me off? No, I would encourage you to use them even more. And where do they come from? Because if we've got these other signs like quotation marks, why do we need brackets? When did they appear and why do we need them? So the parentheses came about also at the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. The Chancellor of Florence, who was a humanist, Coluccio Salutati, he collected manuscripts. He was in love with Latin and the

18:23good expression of Latin and creating script that was much easier to read. He invented parentheses in text, a kind of mocking text about what's better, law or medicine. And he was a lawyer and he said, law is better, of course. And he put these little aside. He was the first person to put an exclamation mark. He wasn't the inventor of the exclamation mark, but the first person to use it. But he was definitely the first person to put these brackets. And he didn't invent something like an insertion.

19:00That is a figure of speech that the Greeks already had, the Romans already had in their rhetorical manuals. You know, they would tell you how to put a good insertion into a bigger sentence or a bigger topic or something. So part of rhetoric. Exactly. It's a part of rhetoric. But he made that visible. And this is also something that we see in the Renaissance as well, that something that was there before as rhetoric and that they would be learning in their education, they would make that visible to make reading faster with less

19:31potential for error. For example, if it's clear that this is an insertion, you know, we can read the text in a safer way in that sense. I love brackets because the early 16th century educator Erasmus, who wrote a lot about how to teach Latin properly, called them little moons, lunuli. So he said they look like the crescent moon when it's waning and waxing. And I love this evocative nature because it is something about something in the brackets as being kept safe. So I like

20:03that that kind of I think something slightly different. I think the bracket enables me to say I can think of two things at the same time. I'm going for a walk. The trees are great. And it's raining. And I put the trees are great in brackets. I'm thinking two things at the same time. But because writing is linear, we can never express things at the same time. The great thing about the bracket is that it sort of implies at any rate that we're having having those thoughts at the same time. Do you agree?

20:33Yeah, absolutely. There's lots of bracket use. So we put, for example, an aside, something that we don't want to say officially. Maybe it's a qualification of the main sentence. Maybe it's even criticism of the main sentence. Yes, you can criticise yourself, can't you? Exactly. Yeah. Do I really mean that in brackets? Exactly. It's a secret that we might be able to put in a bracket. Or it's even something, as you mentioned before, he said, she said. Some writers, especially in the Renaissance, they will put that into brackets as well. And it always is a sign of something else going on. And so for me, having a sentence with a lot of parentheses is a sign of really advanced

21:07language, actually.

21:11Well, listeners, you're listening to Word of Mouth. And as you may know, the programme is produced in partnership with The Open University. If you'd like to listen to my conversation with The Open University about the words we use, about my own language journey and what I've learnt from the stories behind how we speak, you can visit the BBC Radio for Word of Mouth programme page and then follow the links to The Open University.

The apostrophe and texting

21:34So let's just talk about something much mocked and highly contested, the apostrophe. Oh, the apostrophe is a stepchild of punctuation, I think, and much maligned, much neglected. But maybe we can change our minds about it if we realise that apostrophes help us to navigate the text. For example, when we have a possessive, for example, Bob's book, then we put an apostrophe. We do, but the Germans and your bilingual German speaker, you wouldn't. You would say, let's

22:12say, Otto's Buch. And Otto's Buch would have no apostrophe between Otto and S. Is that right? Yes, that's right. I don't think it was like this 100 years ago. So I think that's a rule that also developed more recently, but that would be quote unquote correct in German. But English does that. And English also has when two vowels come together, for example, he is and then we take the I away and then we have he's, right? So the apostrophe is partially

22:42in order to signal that there has been a letter here and now there isn't. And we somehow just need to mark that. For example, Halloween, we sometimes used to be written as hello apostrophe in in terms of hellos even and then evening, right? So the apostrophe is like a tombstone almost for a letter that has died. Or more letters, as in heared or eyed, because you're then losing all the W-O-U-L as well, aren't you? So it's not just one letter, it can be a whole bunch of them. Yeah, absolutely. We can become creative with that as well. George Bernard Shaw, who was all

23:20about education and language and socialist working class representation, he says we don't actually need apostrophes. He didn't like using them. He would just write H-E-D for heed for he would, for example. And he called them uglies and we don't need them. We can read text without the apostrophe. We could read text without any punctuation actually, but it's always supposed to make reading faster, give us access to text without necessarily having

23:51studied the language for many, many years. And when I'm texting with my offspring, I punctuate less than I do when I'm writing formally and my offspring hardly at all. So are we approaching a time when a lot of punctuation is going to disappear? No, I don't think so. It's a good title for a headline. This is the ruin of the English language, for example, and ChatGPT spells the end of punctuation. But your texting is a very

24:23informal medium and the informal nature of texting, which also sort of approximates speech and comes across as quite conversational. Often stuff falls away, falls by the wayside and that's normal. But we still need to be reading offline. We still need to be reading books, for example, and especially we need to still teach children offline. You're preaching to the converted here, but I'm just thinking of my teenagers going, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I'm writing loads here and I'm not doing any punctuation.

24:54On the one hand, I love this because it is being creative with language. They can flexibly adapt. They will at some point learn. You can't talk to your boss like this or you can't talk to, you know, in a formal situation like that. What if the boss starts talking to the employees like that? Oh, absolutely. I have received messages from my bank with emojis and I was quite upset. I don't want my bank to use them.

Emojis and political punctuation

25:18You've opened the door. You've opened the door to emojis and emoticons. First of all, tell us the difference and are they punctuation? Yes, they are. So the difference between them is that emoticons are punctuation marks being used looking like faces. So you have a colon, a hyphen and an open bracket or a closed bracket and that then looks like a happy face or a sad face in a kind of horizontal way. And they came around in the early 80s, in the early days of the internet. And then fast forward a couple of decades and now we

25:50have emojis that represent faces again, but becoming quite complicated potentially. What's the difference between a laughing face with tears or without tears, for example? And now we also have emojis that represent objects like a microphone or a popcorn bag. I think emojis open up a metaphorical realm of interpretation where we either we have a text and an emoji or we just have some emojis together and then we need to interpret what is the relationship here. So in that sense, they have

26:23quite a complicated function. And I love that, that they are very creative and generative. They help us animate the page, don't they? Absolutely, because text is dead in the sense of being disembodied. We don't have our facial expressions, we don't have our gestures, our posture even, or especially the inflection of the language, of the voice, right? And so in text itself, we are struggling and we use punctuation, for example, to try to replicate some of those speech patterns. Now, in texting, we don't even have an object like

26:56the paper anymore. So you have your device, I have my device, and we are receiving and sending off messages. It's really doubly disembodied. And great scope for misunderstanding. Absolutely. And so we are constantly grasping at how can I make this more personable? How can I represent myself? And how can I make sure that you hopefully don't misread my message? So we have these winky face emojis in order to make sure, I just, I don't mean that, I'm being ironic, right? And that's also why we have a lot of doubling and tripling of letters or punctuation. For example,

27:31hello, with five O's and three exclamation marks. Now, one great innovator, well, not so much an innovator as a re-user of punctuation, is Donald Trump. So I thought when we sign off today, I just wondered whether we could sign off in a Trumpian way, drawing attention to the style in which it might be written down on the page. So if I say thank you very much, I think I'm going to say that in capital letters with three exclamation

28:04marks, Florence, maybe I'm being ironic, because maybe Trump doesn't like you very much. Okay, so I'll put a sort of irony sign of some sort. And then over to you now to reply to me as a surrogate Trump. Oh, I would probably not even use three, but maybe 15 exclamation marks, because he's a huge fan of this. Between 2015 and his presidential candidacy and him becoming a president, he had something like 55,000 tweets and 70,000 exclamation marks. So we definitely need more for him, Michael,

28:37than three. How many spaces does X now have? I think 280. So thank you in capital letters and the rest of the spaces, exclamation marks. Florence Hazrat, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Michael. It felt like everything I believed in was suddenly collapsing. This is the story of an Islamic boarding school in Indonesia with a dark secret of the school's head teacher. This was someone I respected above anyone else. And the investigation led by students

29:12he's trying to silence. If this is leaked to the media, I'll be destroyed. This is World of Secrets, catching my teacher. Listen on BBC.com, the BBC app, or wherever you get your BBC podcasts.