Punctuation

During antiquity, most scribes in the West wrote in scriptio continua, i.e., without punctuation delimiting word boundaries. Around the 5th century BC, the Greeks began using punctuation consisting of vertically arranged dots—usually a dicolon or tricolon—as an aid in the oral delivery of texts. After 200 BC, Greek scribes adopted the théseis system invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, where a single dot called a punctus was placed at one of several heights to denote rhetorical divisions in speech:

• hypostigmḗ – a low punctus on the baseline to mark off a komma (a unit smaller than a clause)
• stigmḕ mésē – a punctus at midheight to mark off a clause (kōlon)
• stigmḕ teleía – a high punctus to mark off a sentence (periodos)^[6]

In addition, the Greeks used the paragraphos (or gamma) to mark the beginning of sentences, marginal diples to mark quotations, and a koronis to indicate the end of major sections.

During the 1st century BC, Romans also made occasional use of symbols to indicate pauses, but by the 4th century AD the Greek théseis—called distinctiones in Latin^[a]—prevailed, as reported by Aelius Donatus and Isidore of Seville (7th century). Latin texts were sometimes laid out per capitula, where each sentence was placed on its own line. Diples were used, but by the late period, these often degenerated into comma-shaped marks.

Punctuation developed dramatically when large numbers of copies of the Bible started to be produced. These were designed to be read aloud, so the copyists began to introduce a range of marks to aid the reader, including indentation, various punctuation marks (diple, paragraphos, simplex ductus), and an early version of initial capitals (litterae notabiliores). Jerome and his colleagues, who translated the Bible into Latin, the Vulgate (c. AD 400), employed a layout system based on established practices for teaching the speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero. Under his layout per cola et commata every sense-unit was indented and given its own line. This layout was solely used for biblical manuscripts during the 5th–9th centuries, but was abandoned in favor of punctuation.

In the 7th–8th centuries Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes, whose native languages were not derived from Latin, added more visual cues to render texts more intelligible. Irish scribes introduced the practice of word separation.^[7] Likewise, insular scribes adopted the distinctiones system while adapting it for minuscule script (so as to be more prominent) by using not differing height but rather a differing number of marks—aligned horizontally (or sometimes triangularly)—to signify a pause's duration: one mark for a minor pause, two for a medium one, and three for a major one. Most common were the punctus, a comma-shaped mark, and a 7-shaped mark (comma positura), often used in combination. The same marks could be used in the margin to mark off quotations.

In the late 8th century, a different system emerged in France under the Carolingian dynasty. Originally indicating how the voice should be modulated when chanting the liturgy, the positurae migrated into any text meant to be read aloud, and then to all manuscripts. Positurae first reached England in the late 10th century, probably during the Benedictine reform movement, but was not adopted until after the Norman conquest. The original positurae were the punctus, marking a minor pause within the sentence, punctus elevatus, marking a major pause within the sentence, punctus versus, marking the end of a declarative sentence, and punctus interrogativus, marking the end of an interrogative sentence. A fifth symbol, the punctus flexus was added in the 10th century to indicate a pause of a value between the punctus and punctus elevatus. In the late 11th/early 12th century, the punctus versus disappeared and was taken over by the simple punctus (now with two distinct values).^[8][9]

The late Middle Ages saw the addition of the virgula suspensiva (slash or slash with a midpoint dot), which was often used in conjunction with the punctus for different types of pauses. Direct quotations were marked with marginal diples, as in Antiquity, but from at least the 12th century, scribes also began entering diples (sometimes double) within the column of text.

Punctuation marks, especially spacing, were not needed in logographic or syllabic (such as Chinese and Mayan script) texts because disambiguation and emphasis could be communicated by employing a separate written form distinct from the spoken form of the language.^{[clarification needed][citation needed]} Ancient Chinese classical texts were transmitted without punctuation. However, many Warring States period bamboo texts contain the symbols ⟨└⟩ and ⟨▄⟩ indicating the end of a chapter and full stop, respectively.^[10] By the Song dynasty, the addition of punctuation to texts by scholars to aid comprehension became common.^[11]

The amount of printed material and its readership began to increase after the invention of moveable type in Europe in the 1450s. Martin Luther's German Bible translation was one of the first mass-printed works; he used only virgule, full stop, and less than one percent question marks as punctuation. The focus of punctuation still was rhetorical, to aid reading aloud.^[12] As explained by writer and editor Lynne Truss, "The rise of printing in the 14th and 15th centuries meant that a standard system of punctuation was urgently required."^[13] Printed books, whose letters were uniform, could be read much more rapidly than manuscripts. Rapid reading, or reading aloud, did not allow time to analyze sentence structures. This increased speed led to the greater use and finally standardization of punctuation, which showed the relationships of words with each other: where one sentence ends and another begins, for example.

The introduction of a standard system of punctuation has also been attributed to the Venetian printers Aldus Manutius and his grandson. They have been credited with popularizing the practice of ending sentences with the colon or full stop (period), inventing the semicolon, making occasional use of parentheses, and creating the modern comma by lowering the virgule. By 1566, Aldus Manutius the Younger was able to state that the main object of punctuation was the clarification of syntax.^[14]

By the 19th century, punctuation in the Western world had evolved "to classify the marks hierarchically, in terms of weight".^[3] Cecil Hartley's poem identifies their relative values:

The use of punctuation was not standardised until after the invention of printing. According to the 1885 edition of The American Printer, the importance of punctuation was noted in various sayings by children, such as:

With a semicolon and a comma added, it reads as follows:

In a 19th-century manual of typography, Thomas MacKellar writes:

Shortly after the invention of printing, the necessity of stops or pauses in sentences for the guidance of the reader produced the colon and full point. In the process of time, the comma was added, which was then merely a perpendicular line, proportioned to the body of the letter. These three points were the only ones used until the close of the fifteenth century, when Aldo Manuccio gave a better shape to the comma, and added the semicolon; the comma denoting the shortest pause, the semicolon next, then the colon, and the full point terminating the sentence. The marks of interrogation and admiration were introduced many years later.^[17]

The introduction of electrical telegraphy with a limited set of transmission codes^[18] and typewriters with a limited set of keys influenced punctuation subtly. For example, curved quotes and apostrophes were all collapsed into two characters (' and "). The hyphen, minus sign, and dashes of various widths have been collapsed into a single character (-), sometimes repeated to represent a long dash. The spaces of different widths available to professional typesetters were generally replaced by a single full-character-width space, with typefaces monospaced. In some cases, a typewriter keyboard did not include an exclamation point (!), which could otherwise be constructed by the overstrike of an apostrophe and a period; the original Morse code did not have an exclamation point.

These simplifications have been carried forward into digital writing, with teleprinters and the ASCII character set essentially supporting the same characters as typewriters. Treatment of whitespace in HTML discouraged the practice (in English prose) of putting two full spaces after a full stop, since a single or double space would appear the same on the screen. (Most style guides now discourage double spaces, and some electronic writing tools, including Wikipedia's software, automatically collapse double spaces to single.) The full traditional set of typesetting tools became available with the advent of desktop publishing and more sophisticated word processors. Despite the widespread adoption of character sets like Unicode that support the punctuation of traditional typesetting, writing forms like text messages tend to use the simplified ASCII style of punctuation, with the addition of new non-text characters like emoji. Informal text speak tends to drop punctuation when not needed, including some ways that would be considered errors in more formal writing.

In the computer era, punctuation characters were recycled for use in programming languages and URLs. Due to its use in email and Twitter handles, the at sign (@) has gone from an obscure character mostly used by sellers of bulk commodities (10 pounds @$2.00 per pound), to a very common character in common use for both technical routing and an abbreviation for "at". The tilde (~), in moveable type only used in combination with vowels, for mechanical reasons ended up as a separate key on mechanical typewriters, and like @ it has been put to completely new uses.

There are two major styles of punctuation in English: British or American. These two styles differ mainly in the way in which they handle quotation marks, particularly in conjunction with other punctuation marks. In British English, punctuation marks such as full stops and commas are placed inside the quotation mark only if they are part of what is being quoted, and placed outside the closing quotation mark if part of the containing sentence. In American English, however, such punctuation is generally placed inside the closing quotation mark regardless. This rule varies for other punctuation marks; for example, American English follows the British English rule when it comes to semicolons, colons, question marks, and exclamation points.^{[19][further explanation needed]} The serial comma is used much more often in the United States than in the UK.

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Other languages of Europe use much the same punctuation as English. The similarity is so strong that the few variations may confuse a native English reader. Quotation marks are particularly variable across European languages. For example, in French and Russian, quotes would appear as: « Je suis fatigué. » (In French, the quotation marks are spaced from the enclosed material; in Russian, they are not.)

In the French of France and Belgium, the marks ⟨:⟩, ⟨;⟩, ⟨?⟩ and ⟨!⟩ are preceded by a thin space. In Canadian French, this is only the case for ⟨:⟩.^[20][21]

In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point ⟨·⟩, known as the ano teleia (άνω τελεία).

In Georgian, three dots ⟨჻⟩ were formerly used as a sentence or paragraph divider. It is still sometimes used in calligraphy.

Spanish and Asturian (both of them Romance languages used in Spain) use an inverted question mark ⟨¿⟩ at the beginning of a question and the normal question mark at the end, as well as an inverted exclamation mark ⟨¡⟩ at the beginning of an exclamation and the normal exclamation mark at the end.^[22]

Armenian uses several punctuation marks of its own. The full stop is represented by a colon, and vice versa; the exclamation mark is represented by a diagonal similar to a tilde ⟨~⟩, while the question mark ⟨՞⟩ resembles an unclosed circle placed after the last vowel of the word.

Arabic, Urdu, and Persian—written from right to left—use a reversed question mark: ⟨؟⟩, and a reversed comma: ⟨،⟩. This is a modern innovation; pre-modern Arabic did not use punctuation. Hebrew, which is also written from right to left, uses the same characters as in English, ⟨,⟩ and ⟨?⟩.^[23]

Originally, Sanskrit had no punctuation. In the 17th century, Sanskrit and Marathi, both written using Devanagari, started using the vertical bar ⟨।⟩ to end a line of prose and double vertical bars ⟨॥⟩ in verse.

Punctuation was not used in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese chữ Nôm writing until the adoption of punctuation from the West in the late 19th and early 20th century. In unpunctuated texts, the grammatical structure of sentences in classical writing is inferred from context.^[24] Most punctuation marks in modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have similar functions to their English counterparts; however, they often look different and have different customary rules.

In the Indian subcontinent, ⟨:-⟩ is sometimes used in place of colon or after a subheading. Its origin is unclear, but it could be a remnant of the British Raj. Another punctuation practice common in the Indian Subcontinent for writing monetary amounts is the use of ⟨/-⟩ or ⟨/=⟩ after the number. For example, Rs. 20/- or Rs. 20/= implies 20 whole rupees.

Thai, Khmer, Lao, and Burmese did not use punctuation until the adoption of punctuation from the West in the 20th century. Blank spaces are more frequent than full stops or commas.

In 1962, American advertising executive Martin K. Speckter proposed the interrobang (‽), a combination of the question mark and exclamation point, to mark rhetorical questions or questions stated in a tone of disbelief. Although the new punctuation mark was widely discussed in the 1960s, it failed to achieve widespread use.^[25] Nevertheless, both it and its inverted form were given code points in Unicode: U+203D ‽ INTERROBANG, U+2E18 ⸘ INVERTED INTERROBANG.

The six additional punctuation marks proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin in his book Plumons l'Oiseau ("Let's pluck the bird", 1966)^[26] could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis.

These were:^[27]

• the "irony point" or "irony mark" (point d'ironie: )
• the "love point" (point d'amour: )

  

• the "conviction point" (point de conviction: )
• the "authority point" (point d'autorité: )
• the "acclamation point" (point d'acclamation: )
• the "doubt point" (point de doute: )

An international patent application was filed, and published in 1992 under World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) number WO9219458,^[28] for two new punctuation marks: the "question comma" and the "exclamation comma". The question comma has a comma instead of the dot at the bottom of a question mark, while the exclamation comma has a comma in place of the point at the bottom of an exclamation mark. These were intended for use as question and exclamation marks within a sentence, a function for which normal question and exclamation marks can also be used, but which may be considered obsolescent. The patent application entered the national phase only in Canada. It was advertised as lapsing in Australia on 27 January 1994^[29] and in Canada on 6 November 1995.^[30]

Other proposed punctuation marks include:^[31]

• Snark mark, indicating an ironic statement by putting a tilde next to terminal punctuation: .~ for dry sarcasm, !~ for enthusiastic sarcasm, and ?~ for sarcastic questions
• Rhetorical question mark:
• SarcMark for sarcasm