From: John W Kennedy (jwkenne@attglobal.net)
Date: Fri Jan 09 2009 - 22:23:44 CST
On Jan 9, 2009, at 3:25 AM, Adam Twardoch wrote:
> At some point there were no punctuation characters. So written text
> were
> just "words".
Not even that, in fact. The first punctuation to be invented was the
word space, and it took millennia to be fully accepted in the West.
> I can imagine that some people opposed the idea of adding
> dots and commas and dashes, because they were "silent" marks that did
> not so much influence the contents of the text but more its form (at
> least that may have been the thinking).
They first turn up as hints to actors in Greek drama. The shift from
primarily indicating spoken pauses to primarily indicating syntactic
units comes only around the end of the Early Modern era.
-- John W Kennedy "I want everybody to be smart. As smart as they can be. A world of ignorant people is too dangerous to live in." -- Garson Kanin. "Born Yesterday"
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