The writings in the earlier stages were syllabic and logographic. The earliest writings did not need punctuation or spacing as each of the characters was self-contained in the symbol, typically. As previously demonstrated, the lack of spacing in alphabets and punctuation made comprehension very difficult. The comprehension was so hard that in ancient Greece, it was a rare feat for an individual to understand a text they were reading for the first time. The loud readout to a group without proper practice beforehand was not something typically done.
Keeping a few notable exceptions aside, punctuation in the West was not really seen until the end of the 3rd century BC when Aristophanes of Byzantium, the Head Librarian of Alexandria, introduced the precursors of today’s punctuation marks. He gave the idea of inserting dots to indicate where a passage ended, and the length of pause needed when speaking a text. This convention subsequently began to appear in various Greek works and became relatively standardized to some degree.
Punctuation marks
Surprisingly, the Greek marks that came to be our colon, comma, and period were not describing their dotted punctuation marks themselves; instead, the length of the piece of text that was being set apart. A low mark hypostigme denoted a “unit smaller than a clause”, which was called comma, a mid-high mark, stigma mese, distinguished a clause or colon, and a high-mark, stigma telia, denoted an entire sentence, known as periods.
Everyone was not a fan of these punctuation marks. The entire purpose of marks was not syntactical but rather, elocutionary, like the famous Roman orator Cicero rejected such punctuation. He noted things like how and when to pause for breath “ought to be determined not by a stroke interposed by a copyist, but the constraint of the rhythm”.
Thanks to the Romans’ influence, the punctuation introduced by the Greeks deteriorated as the oral tradition of Rome dominated. As Christianity started spreading across Europe via written texts, its scribes started punctuating again in order to preserve the original meaning of the word. By the 7th and 8th centuries, spaces between words were becoming more common and are believed to have been invented by Irish and Scottish monks of this era. These monks were tired of struggling with separating unfamiliar Latin words. At the end of the 8th century, Charlemagne is the one who is credited for the invention of lowercase letters.
However, overuse of punctuation continued to some extent through the late 19th century until Henry Watson and Francis George, lexicographers, published The King’s English in 1906. The book established the style of light punctuation that endures to this day.
