In the 7 th century, Isidore of Seville resurrected the dots originally proposed by Aristophanes. The Romans, namely Cicero, believed the speaker should exert discretion over his or her rhythm of speech and not be bound by dots or punctuation. With this, a reader would know when to pause and for how long to produce cohesive and understandable speech.Īlas, the Aristophanean method was eventually scrapped when the Roman empire gained precedence over the Greeks from their politics to their writing. A dot located in the bottom denoted a short pause like a comma, the middle was for an intermediate pause like a colon, and the bottom was for a pause much like a full stop. Aristophanes proposed that writers use three types of dots to allocate the appropriate pause between formal parts of speech. Aristophanes had offered a solution to the completely run-on writing style of the Greeks, which featured spaces between letters, words, clauses, or sentences. As he notes, the earliest prominent use of any punctuation was in the 3 rd century BC. Keith Houston of the BBC has a rather intricate and detailed timeline for this history of punctuation (which this article will follow). Regardless, punctuation in English has a rich and surprising history from the full stop to the semicolon and even quotation marks. Perhaps your appreciation for punctuation is all but non-existent or maybe you secretly love the Oxford comma.
You can also recognise when some punctuation just isn’’t right. But, why is it that we have both a colon and a semicolon? Whether or not you know of their purpose, you’re able to determine and adjust your speech and reading comprehension when you see one. Unlike a word we’ve never seen, your listeners would be none the wiser if you came across a new and unrecognisable piece of punctuation while reading aloud. Have you ever stopped and wondered why we mark our texts with symbols such as commas, question marks, and the like? Of course, we all seem to recognise and understand punctuation with ease.
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