There was a time when writing had no punctuation at all, and often no spaces between words and no lowercase letters either. Punctuation began with dots that a librarian in ancient Alexandria added to help readers, and spaces, lowercase letters, and the comma followed over the centuries after him. English inherited its alphabet, and these marks with it, from Latin.
Picture a text with no punctuation, no lowercase letters, and no spaces. This sentence would have looked like this: THISSENTENCEWOULDHAVELOOKEDLIKETHIS. Reading and writing must have been hard work, and misunderstandings easy. Luckily, people came up with punctuation, lowercase letters, and spaces. But when did they start to use them, who introduced them, and why? The history of punctuation answers all three questions.
The start of punctuation
Punctuation has a different history in every writing system. In scripts where a symbol stands for a whole word, such as Chinese, each word is already a unit, so there is less need for spaces or marks. In alphabetic writing, though, a line of letters without spaces or punctuation is hard to make sense of.
In ancient Greece, this was a real problem. People who read texts aloud to others had to practice them carefully beforehand, and anyone reading alone often had to go over a passage several times before they understood it.
That began to change around 200 BCE, when Aristophanes of Byzantium, a librarian in the Greek city of Alexandria in Egypt, decided that something had to be done. He is credited with one of the first systems of punctuation. He suggested adding dots at different heights in the line to show the reader where to pause, and for how long. This helped a great deal, because it was hard to read a long passage aloud without stopping to catch your breath. The words comma, colon, and period go back to the Greek names for the parts of a sentence that his dots marked.
Still, in both Greece and Rome, speaking well was valued more than writing. The Romans did not take up Aristophanes' system. Cicero, one of the most famous public speakers in Rome, argued that the end of a sentence should be decided by the rhythm of the words, not by a stroke that a copyist had added.
The return of punctuation
As the Roman Empire crumbled in the 4th and 5th centuries, punctuation got a second chance. Christian writers, who wanted their texts to be read and understood correctly, brought back the system that Aristophanes had created. As their writings spread, scribes grew more confident and began to experiment with new marks, one of which later became the question mark.
In the 7th and 8th centuries, Irish and Scottish monks are said to have popularized the space between words. Toward the end of the 8th century, the emperor Charlemagne wanted one clear script for his whole empire, and the scholar Alcuin of York helped to create it. Its small letters, known as Carolingian minuscule, are the ancestors of our lowercase letters. Later still, a slash recommended by the 13th-century Italian scholar Boncompagno da Signa slowly turned into the modern comma.
Punctuation today
English has many grammar rules that can be confusing, but punctuation is one of the best things that ever happened to written language: without it, every text would be far harder to read. Some people even call emojis a new kind of punctuation, and who knows what marks future generations will come up with.
For the marks you use every day, read these punctuation rules, and for one question that comes up again and again, do punctuation marks go inside or outside quotation marks?