Friday 6 April 2012

What's this? It could be — Yes! An essay about punctuation-type stuff: part one




Throughout most of the history of written language, people made do without punctuation.
In this context, “people” refers mainly to ancient Egyptian priests, who seem to have kept a tight hold on the whole recording of words trick as a trade secret for several thousand years. The only regular graphic device they used to distinguish one group of symbols from those around it was the cartouche, an elegant oval around the name of the pharaoh. (And lucky for us they did — the cartouches on the Rosetta Stone proved a key clue for matching the hieroglyphic text with the adjacent Greek translation and deciphering the whole language.)
Egyptian hieroglyphic writing used a convoluted system of word, syllable and sound symbols a lot like modern Japanese, only worse. Other people around the Mediterranean adapted and modified the system, finding a system based mostly on word sounds easier to learn, since it requires fewer symbols. You only need a few dozen sound or syllable characters to represent a spoken language, but you need thousands of characters if each word gets its own.
So your Phoenicians (resemblance to “phonetic” a funny coincidence), Hebrews and Etruscans eventually got things down to one letter per sound, more or less. They didn’t punctuate or bother to put a space between words. Vowels — who needs ’em?
Cn y rd ths sntnc? Nt tht hrd, rlly. Asforwordspacing,thinkofallthenewsprintwecouldsavewithoutit.
When the Greeks took over the one symbol per sound, or alphabetic, system, they introduced written vowels. Linguists do not agree about whether that happened through a conscious act of invention or as who should say organically.
A librarian at Alexandria gets credit for introducing punctuation in the sense we understand it, around 200 BCE. His inventions included the question mark, except it looked like a semicolon, and written Greek still goes with that.
The rest of this fascinating story plays out through medieval times into the period after Gutenberg. I will leave that for another time, so we can anticipate the invention of lower case letters and other wonders.
Except for this conundrum that has nagged me for decades: I found a source about punctuation that said the Latin question mark (?) was adapted from neumes, a system of squiggles written over words in liturgical chant books to indicate pitch, before the invention of staff lines. So, the theory goes, scribes copied the rising pitch neume to represent the rising pitch of a spoken question.
That theory has two problems. First, not all spoken questions have rising pitch, across languages or within single languages. Second, I found a history of neumes that said they developed from written punctuation, such as the question mark.
The paleographer who sorts this out wins the Hawk and Handsaw Prize for 2012.
For today, I just want to offer some typographic terminology for general use. People throw around he word “dash” pretty loosely and mostly don’t like saying “hyphen,” and sometimes call a hyphen a dash, bless their hearts. To printers and copy editors, dashes and hyphens have distinct appearances and uses.
Typesetters call dashes “m-dashes” and hyphens “n-dashes” because of their set width, equal to the width of the letter m or n in that font.
The short version of proper use: hyphens within a compound word, dashes to separate thoughts.
The short version of how to make the world a better place: lay off the dashes.
I have noticed a tendency for people to use dashes as a universal punctuation, replacing commas, periods, semicolons and parentheses. Newspapers have contributed to the trend by preferring paired dashes where parentheses have served for a few hundred years.
Where the dash serves correctly to separate thoughts, people seem to want it to add suspense or drama. I can’t agree that the little line has that much mojo, but even if it does, I see it far too much.
This goes under my “one gimmick per day” rule, which I shall expound more on later, along with scare quotes, colons and — heaven help me — capitalization.
Ceterum censeo “utilize” esse delendam.

1 comment:

http://www.professional-essay-writing.com/cover-letter/ said...

That is very interesting excursus into a history of writing. The information will be extremely useful for my assignment! Thank you.