punctuation

punctuation
punctuational, punctuative, adj.
/pungk'chooh ay"sheuhn/, n.
1. the practice or system of using certain conventional marks or characters in writing or printing in order to separate elements and make the meaning clear, as in ending a sentence or separating clauses.
2. the act of punctuating.
3. punctuation marks.
[1530-40; < ML punctuation- (s. of punctuatio) a marking, pointing. See PUNCTUATE, -ION]

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Standard set of marks used in written and printed texts to clarify meaning and to separate sentences, words, and parts of words.

It often marks discourse features such as intonational contours and pauses. It may also convey information about a word (e.g., hyphens in compound words) unrelated to speech patterns. In English, the period (.) marks the end of a sentence or an abbreviation. The comma (,) usually separates clauses, phrases, or items in a series. The colon (:) often introduces an explanation or series of examples. The semicolon (;) usually separates independent clauses. The em-dash (
) marks an abrupt transition. The exclamation point (!) signals surprise. The question mark (?) signals a question. The apostrophe (') marks the possessive case or the omission of letters. Quotation marks (" ") set off either quoted words or words used with special significance. Interpolations in a sentence are marked by brackets ([ ]) or parentheses ( ).

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Introduction

      the use of spacing, conventional signs, and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading, both silently and aloud, of handwritten and printed texts. The word is derived from the Latin punctus, “point.” From the 15th century to the early 18th the subject was known in English as pointing; and the term punctuation, first recorded in the middle of the 16th century, was reserved for the insertion of vowel points (marks placed near consonants to indicate preceding or following vowels) in Hebrew texts. The two words exchanged meanings between 1650 and 1750.

      Since the late 16th century the theory and practice of punctuation have varied between two main schools of thought: the elocutionary school, following late medieval practice, treated points or stops as indications of the pauses of various lengths that might be observed by a reader, particularly when he was reading aloud to an audience; the syntactic school, which had won the argument by the end of the 17th century, saw them as something less arbitrary, namely, as guides to the grammatical construction of sentences. Pauses in speech and breaks in syntax tend in any case to coincide; and although writers are now agreed that the main purpose of punctuation is to clarify the grammar of a text, they also require it to take account of the speed and rhythm of actual speech.

      Syntactic punctuation is, by definition, bad when it obscures rather than clarifies the construction of sentences. Good punctuation, however, may be of many kinds: to take two extreme examples, Henry James (James, Henry) would be unintelligible without his numerous commas, but Ernest Hemingway (Hemingway, Ernest) seldom needs any stop but the period. In poetry, in which the elocutionary aspect of punctuation is still important, and to a lesser degree in fiction, especially when the style is close to actual speech, punctuation is much at the author's discretion. In nonfictional writing there is less room for experiment. Stimulating variant models for general use might be the light punctuation of George Bernard Shaw's prefaces to his plays and the heavier punctuation of T.S. Eliot's literary and political essays.

Punctuation in Greek (Greek language) and Latin to 1600
      The punctuation now used with English and other western European languages is derived ultimately from the punctuation used with Greek and Latin during the classical period. Much work remains to be done on the history of the subject, but the outlines are clear enough. Greek inscriptions were normally written continuously, with no divisions between words or sentences; but, in a few inscriptions earlier than the 5th century BC, phrases were sometimes separated by a vertical row of two or three points. In the oldest Greek literary texts, written on papyrus during the 4th century BC, a horizontal line called the paragraphos was placed under the beginning of a line in which a new topic was introduced. This is the only form of punctuation mentioned by Aristotle. Aristophanes Of Byzantium, who became librarian of the Museum at Alexandria about 200 BC, is usually credited with the invention of the critical signs, marks of quantity, accents, breathings, and so on, still employed in Greek texts, and with the beginnings of the Greek system of punctuation. Rhetorical theory divided discourse into sections of different lengths. Aristophanes marked the end of the short section (called a comma) by a point after the middle of its last letter, that of the longer section (colon) by a point after the bottom of the letter, and that of the longest section (periodos) by a point after the top of the letter. Since books were still being written in tall majuscule letters, like those used in inscriptions and like modern capital letters, the three positions were easily distinguishable. Aristophanes' system was seldom actually used, except in a degenerated version involving only two points. In the 8th or 9th century it was supplemented by the Greek form of question mark (;). The modern system of punctuating Greek texts was established by the Italian and French printers of the Renaissance, whose practice was incorporated in the Greek types cut by Claude Garamond (Garamond, Claude) for Francis I of France between 1541 and 1550. The colon is not used in Greek, and the semicolon is represented by a high point. Quotation marks and the exclamation mark were added more recently.

      In almost all Roman inscriptions points were used to separate words. In the oldest Latin (Latin language) documents and books, dating from the end of the 1st century BC to the beginning of the 2nd century AD, words were divided by points, and a change of topic was sometimes indicated by paragraphing: the first letter or two of the new paragraph projected into the margin, instead of being indented as has been done since the 17th century. Roman scholars, including the 4th-century grammarian Donatus (Donatus, Aelius) and the 6th-century patron of monastic learning Cassiodorus, recommended the three-point system of Aristophanes, which was perfectly workable with the majuscule Latin scripts then in use. In practice, however, Latin books in their period were written continuously—the point between words had been abandoned. The ends of sentences were marked, if at all, by only a gap (which might be followed by an enlarged letter) or by an occasional point. The only books that were well punctuated at that time were copies of the Vulgate Bible, for which its translator, St. Jerome (Jerome, Saint) (died 419/420), devised punctuation per cola et commata (“by phrases”), a rhetorical system, based on manuscripts of Demosthenes and Cicero, which was especially designed to assist reading aloud. Each phrase began with a letter projecting into the margin and was in fact treated as a minute paragraph, before which the reader was expected to take a new breath.

      During the 7th and 8th centuries, which saw the transition from majuscule to minuscule handwriting (minuscule scripts were usually smaller than majuscule and had projections above and below the body of the letters, as in modern lowercase letters), scribes to whom the Latin language was no longer as well known as it had been—especially Irish, Anglo-Saxon, and German scribes, to whom it was a foreign language—began to separate words. It was only in the 13th century that monosyllables, especially prepositions, were finally detached from the word following them. The introduction of spaces between words was critical to the development of silent reading, a practice that began only about the 10th century. To mark sentences, a space at the end became the rule; and an enlarged letter, often a majuscule, generally stood at the beginning of sentences and paragraphs alike. The use of points was somewhat confused by St. Isidore of Sevilla (Isidore of Sevilla, Saint) (died 636), whose encyclopaedia recommended an aberrant version of the three-point system; but a point, high or low, was still used within or after sentences. The ends of sentences were often marked by a group of two or three marks, one of which might be a comma and not a simple point.

      St. Jerome's concern for the punctuation of sacred texts was shared by Charlemagne, king of the Franks and Holy Roman emperor, and his Anglo-Saxon adviser Alcuin, who directed the palace school at Aachen from 782 to 796. An important element in the educational revival over which they presided was the improvement of spelling and punctuation in biblical and liturgical manuscripts. It is in the earliest specimens of the new Carolingian minuscule script, written at Corbie and Aachen about 780–800, that the first evidence for a new system of punctuation appears. It soon spread, with the script itself, throughout Europe, reaching its perfection in the 12th century. Single interior stops in the form of points or commas and final groups of stops continued in use; but they were joined by the mark later known as punctus elevatus () and by the question mark (punctus interrogativus), of much the same shape as the modern one but inclined to the right. The source of these two new marks was apparently the system of musical notation, called neumes (neume), which is known to have been used for Gregorian chant from at least the beginning of the 9th century. Punctus elevatus and punctus interrogativus indicated not only a pause and a syntactic break but also an appropriate inflection of the voice. By the 12th century another mark, punctus circumflexus (), had been added to elevatus to indicate a rising inflection at the end of a subordinate clause, especially when the grammatical sense of the sentence was still not complete. Liturgical manuscripts in particular, between the 10th and the 13th centuries, made full use of this inflectional system: it is the origin of the “colon” still used to divide verses of the Psalms in breviaries and prayer books. In the later Middle Ages it was especially the Cistercian, Dominican, and Carthusian orders and the members of religious communities such as the Brethren of the Common Life who troubled to preserve a mode of punctuation admirably adapted to the constant reading aloud, in church and refectory, that characterized the religious life. The hyphen, to mark words divided at the ends of lines, appeared late in the 10th century; single at first, it was often doubled in the period between the 14th and 18th centuries.

      Most late medieval punctuation was haphazard by comparison with 12th-century work—notably in the university textbooks produced at Paris, Bologna, and Oxford in the 13th and 14th centuries. In them, as elsewhere, a form of paragraph mark representing c for capitulum (“chapter”) is freely used at the beginning of sentences. Within the same period the plain point and punctus elevatus are joined by the virgule (/) as an alternative form of light stop. Vernacular literature followed the less formal types of Latin literature; and the printers, as usual, followed the scribes. The first printed texts of the Bible and the liturgy are, as a rule, carefully punctuated on the inflectional principle. The profusion of points and virgules in the English books of the printer William Caxton pays remarkably little attention to syntax. Parentheses appeared about 1500. During the 15th century some English legal documents were already being written without punctuation; and British and American lawyers still use extremely light punctuation in the hope of avoiding possible ambiguities.

      The beginnings of postmedieval punctuation can be traced to the excellent manuscripts of classical and contemporary Latin texts copied in the new humanistic scripts by Italian scribes of the 15th century. To about 1450, the point and the punctus elevatus seem to have been preferred for minor pauses; after that date they are often replaced by the virgule and what is now called the colon (:). The virgule, originally placed high, sank to the baseline and developed a curve—it turned, in fact, into a modern comma. The Venetian editor and printer Aldus Manutius (Manutius, Aldus, the Elder) (Aldo Manuzio; died 1515) made improvements in the humanistic system, and in 1566 his grandson of the same name expounded a similar system in his Orthographiae ratio (“System of Orthography”); it included, under different names, the modern comma, semicolon, colon, and full point, or period. Most importantly, the younger Aldo stated plainly for the first time the view that clarification of syntax is the main object of punctuation. By the end of the 17th century the various marks had received their modern names, and the exclamation mark, quotation marks, and the dash had been added to the system.

Punctuation in English since 1600
      By the end of the 16th century writers of English were using most of the marks described by the younger Aldo in 1566; but their purpose was elocutionary, not syntactic. When George Puttenham (Puttenham, George), in his treatise The Arte of English Poesie (1589), and Simon Daines, in Orthoepia Anglicana (1640), specified a pause of one unit for a comma, of two units for a semicolon, and of three for a colon, they were no doubt trying to bring some sort of order into a basically confused and unsatisfactory situation. The punctuation of Elizabethan drama, of the devotional prose of John Donne or of Richard Hooker, and indeed of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678) was almost wholly elocutionary; and it lacked the inflectional element that had been the making of 12th-century punctuation. It was Ben Jonson (Jonson, Ben), in his English Grammar, a work composed about 1617 and published posthumously in 1640, who first recommended syntactic punctuation in England. An early example is the 1625 edition of Francis Bacon's Essayes; and from the Restoration onward syntactic punctuation was in general use. Influential treatises on syntactic punctuation were published by Robert Monteith in 1704 and Joseph Robertson in 1795. Excessive punctuation was common in the 18th century: at its worst it used commas with every subordinate clause and separable phrase. Vestiges of this attitude are found in a handbook published in London as late as 1880. It was the lexicographers Henry Watson Fowler (Fowler, H W) and Francis George Fowler, in The King's English, published in 1906, who established the current British practice of light punctuation. Punctuation in the United States has followed much the same path as in Britain, but the rules laid down by American authorities have in general been more rigid than the British rules.

      The system of punctuation now used by writers of English has been complete since the 17th century. Three of its most important components are the space left blank between words; the indentation of the first line of a new paragraph; and the uppercase, or capital, letter written at the beginning of a sentence and at the beginning of a proper name or a title. The marks of punctuation, also known as points or stops, and the chief parts that they play in the system are as follows.

      The end of a grammatically complete sentence is marked by a full point, full stop, or period. The period may also be used to mark abbreviations. The colon (:), which was once used like a full point and was followed by an uppercase letter, now serves mainly to indicate the beginning of a list, summary, or quotation. The semicolon (;) ranks halfway between a comma and a full point. It may be substituted for a period between two grammatically complete sentences that are closely connected in sense; in a long or complicated sentence, it may precede a coordinate conjunction (such as or, and, or but). A comma (,) is the “lightest” of the four basic stops. As the most usual means of indicating the syntactic turning points in a sentence, it is exposed to abuse. It may be used to separate the elements of a series, before a relative clause that does not limit or define its antecedent, in pairs to set off or isolate words or phrases, or in combination with coordinating conjunctions.

      Other punctuation marks used in modern English include parentheses, which serve, like a pair of commas, to isolate a word or phrase; question, exclamation, and quotation marks; the hyphen; and the apostrophe (the use of which became standardized only in the 19th century).

Punctuation in French, Spanish, German, and Russian
      Since the modern punctuation of all the western European languages stems from the practice of the great Italian and French (French language) printers of the 15th and 16th centuries, national differences are not considerable. In French, guillemets ( ) or dashes are used to mark quotations. In Spanish (Spanish language), since the middle of the 18th century, an inverted mark of interrogation or exclamation has stood at the beginning of sentences as well as the normal mark at the end; and quotations may be marked either as in French or as in English. German (German language) punctuation, which is still based on rules propounded in 1781, is more rigorously syntactic than the rest: all relative clauses and all clauses beginning with dass (“that”) must be preceded by a comma. Quotations are marked either by pairs of commas (,,“) or by reversed guillemets ( ). Letter spacing, as well as italic type, is used for emphasis. Early Russian (Russian language) punctuation was based on Greek practice, since the Cyrillic alphabet is derived from the Greek; and by the 17th century several quite elaborate systems had evolved in different areas. Since the 18th century Russia has used a form of western European punctuation that has much in common with German practice: notably an even wider obligatory use of commas with subordinate and indeed coordinate clauses, and letter spacing (as well as italics) for emphasis. German quotation marks, French guillemets, and dashes may be used for direct speech.

Punctuation in Asian and African languages
      In Hebrew (Hebrew language) manuscripts written since the 9th century the main use of points is to indicate the vowel sounds, the alphabet being consonantal only. In biblical texts points and commas are used to mark the middle and end of verses; and in the commentaries points mark the end of sentences. Since the late 18th century, when Jews in Germany began to compose secular texts in Hebrew, the punctuation of such texts has been based on German practice. Early Arabic (Arabic language) manuscripts had no punctuation, since the structure of the language ensured that the main and subordinate clauses were readily distinguishable without it. After Arabic began to be printed, European punctuation marks were gradually adopted. The first such mark was the reversed comma; it is now the most common and indicates a suitable point at which to pause and draw breath.

      In Sanskrit (Sanskrit language), prose texts use one vertical stroke to mark the end of the sentence, and verse texts use one vertical stroke for the end of a line, two for the end of a couplet. In Bengali (Bengali language), Gujarati (Gujarati language), Hindi (Hindi language), and Marathi (Marāṭhī language), the vertical stroke is used as in Sanskrit, in conjunction with other marks borrowed from English. The diacritical signs and elements of punctuation found in Tamil (Tamil language) were introduced early in the 18th century by a Jesuit missionary.

      Before the modern period, the grammatical structure of written Chinese (Chinese languages) was such that no punctuation was required; but in the 19th century editors of texts began to add hollow circles, intended either to mark the ends of phrases or to emphasize particular passages. Since 1912 some of the European punctuation marks have been adopted, notably the marks of interrogation and exclamation and the comma (the hollow circle serves as full point). Direct speech is indicated either by double inverted commas or by an L-shaped mark placed at a corner of the first and last characters. Characters are capitalized by the addition of a straight or wavy line underneath or at the side, according to whether the text is written horizontally or vertically.

      In Japan (Japanese language) a complicated system of kaeriten and kunten marks was used from the 8th century onward to clarify the meaning and grammatical construction of texts in Chinese. As a result of contact with Europeans in the 15th and 16th centuries, a hollow point and a reversed virgule () were used during the Edo period (1603–1868) as equivalents of the European full point and comma. Since 1868 they have been joined by the solid point (to separate items in a list), by the dash used as in English, and, finally, by the European marks of exclamation and interrogation.

      The history of punctuation in Africa is part of the history of the scripts used in different parts of the continent: the Coptic (Coptic language) script, based on the Greek alphabet with some additions from demotic writing, for the ancient language of Egypt; a derivative of South Semitic script, known as Ethiopic (Ethio-Semitic languages), for the languages of Ethiopia; Arabic script for speakers of Arabic, Amazigh (Berber) languages, and Swahili; Latin—i.e., European—script for the languages first recorded during and since the 19th century.

T. Julian Brown

Additional Reading
G.V. Carey, Mind the Stop, rev. ed. (1958, reissued 1976); and E.H. Partridge, You Have a Point There: A Guide to Punctuation and Its Allies (1953, reissued 1978), are traditional guides to modern punctuation as practiced in Britain; the latter is more exhaustive and includes a chapter on American practice by John W. Clark. A comparable American work is the chapter on punctuation in Wilma R. Ebbitt and David R. Ebbitt, Writer's Guide and Index to English, 7th ed. (1982). The following describe the practices of two famous presses, Oxford University Press and the University of Chicago Press: R.M. Ritter (comp. and ed.), The Oxford Style Manual (2003); and The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (2003), which is also available online. Punctuation in antiquity and the Middle Ages is treated in Franz Steffens, Lateinische Paläographie, 2nd ed. (1907, reissued 1964); Peter Clemoes, Liturgical Influence on Punctuation in Late Old English and Early Middle English Manuscripts (1952); and M.B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (1993). Punctuation in and since the Renaissance, especially in Britain, is addressed in the relevant sections in A.C. Partridge, Orthography in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama: A Study of Colloquial Contractions, Elision, Prosody, and Punctuation (1964). An explanation of the grammatical context for punctuation is presented in R. Quirk et al., A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985), Appendix 3.

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