Punctuation

In today's excerpt--comments on punctuation from David Crystal, author, co-author, or editor of over 100 books, including the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and the
Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language:

"Early English manuscripts had no punctuation. They often didn't even have spaces between words. The earliest conventions were introduced as a guide to phrasing when reading aloud became an important activity. ... There was a great deal of experiment. Over thirty marks can be found in medieval manuscripts--various combinations of dots, curls, and dashes. Most of them disappeared after the arrival of printing. Some of them look like modern marks, but their function was not the same: a point, for example, represented a pause, rather than a sentence ending, and the height of a point could vary to express degrees of pause.

"Printers had to make decisions about punctuation and capitalization as well as about spelling. The earliest European printers generally followed the marks they found in the manuscripts, the actual shapes depending on the typeface used. Most recognized three kinds of pause, represented by a point, a virgule (/), and a mark of interrogation. [William] Caxton chiefly used a virgule and a point (.), occasionally a colon (:) and a paragraph mark. Word-breaks at the end of a line were shown by a double-virgule (//). The comma began to replace the virgule in the 1520s. ... Towards the end of the fifteenth century, semicircular parentheses, the question mark, and the semicolon, as well as the comma, were introduced in Europe, but it took some time for them all to appear in England. ...

"There was a great deal of inconsistency of usage, especially when several people worked on the same book. ... Even in modern editions a comparison of two editions (e.g. of Shakespeare's Sonnets) will bring to light a remarkable range of [differences]. ... Uncertainty always surrounds a new punctuation mark. In the sixteenth century there was a great confusion among compositors over the use of the apostrophe. At first they only used it as a marker of an omitted letter; its use as a marker of possession came much later, in the eighteenth century. ... It took a long time for the use of these marks to achieve some sort of stability. In fact, of course, they never did totally stabilize. ... Publishers compile [guidelines] to ensure consistency. No two publishers have the same list. I know, because I have published with many firms. ...

"The history of punctuation shows that the complexity does not disappear. Rather, it changes as time goes by. And it is continuing to change. The biggest punctuation changes since the Renaissance are about to hit us, because of the Internet."

David Crystal, The Fight for English, Oxford, Copyright 2006 by David Crystal, pp. 139-142.

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