As readers and writers, we’re intimately familiar with the dots, strokes and dashes that punctuate the written word. The comma, colon, semicolon and their siblings are integral parts of writing, pointing out grammatical structures and helping us transform letters into spoken words or mental images. We would be lost without them (or, at the very least, extremely confused), and yet the earliest readers and writers managed without it for thousands of years. What changed their minds?
In the 3rd Century BCE, in the Hellenic Egyptian city of Alexandria, a librarian (a person in charge of a library, especially the chief administrative officer of a library)named Aristophanes had had enough. He was chief of staff at the city’s famous library, home to hundreds of thousands of scrolls, which were all frustratingly time-consuming to read. For as long as anyone could remember, the Greeks had written their texts so that their letters ran together with no spaces or punctuation and without any distinction between lowercase and capitals. It was up to the reader to pick their way through this unforgiving mass of letters to discover where each word or sentence ended and the next began.
Yet the lack of punctuation and word spaces was not seen as a problem. In early democracies such as Greece and Rome, where elected officials debated to promote their points of view, eloquent (having or exercising the power of fluent, forceful, and appropriate speech)and persuasive (able, fitted, or intended to persuade)speech was considered more important than written language and readers fully expected that they would have to pore over a scroll before reciting it in public. To be able to understand a text on a first reading was unheard of: when asked to read aloud from an unfamiliar document, a 2nd Century writer named Aulus Gellius protested that he would mangle (to spoil; ruin; mar badly)its meaning and emphasise (to lay stress upon)its words incorrectly. (When a bystander (a person present but not involved; chance spectator; onlooker)stepped in to read the document instead, he did just that.)
Joining the dots
Aristophanes’ breakthrough was to suggest that readers could annotate (to supply with critical or explanatory notes)their documents, relieving the unbroken stream of text with dots of ink aligned with the middle (·), bottom (.) or top (·) of each line. His ‘subordinate’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘full’ points corresponded to the pauses of increasing length that a practised reader would habitually insert between formal units of speech called the comma, colon and periodos. This was not quite punctuation as we know it – Aristophanes saw his marks as representing simple pauses rather than grammatical boundaries – but the seed had been planted.
Unfortunately, not everyone was convinced (to move by argument or evidence to belief, agreement, consent, or a course of action)of the value of this new invention. When the Romans overtook the Greeks as the preeminent (eminent above or before others; superior; surpassing)empire-builders of the ancient world, they abandoned (forsaken or deserted)Aristophanes’ system of dots without a second thought. Cicero, for example, one of Rome’s most famous public speakers, told his rapt (deeply engrossed or absorbed) audiences (the group of spectators at a public event)that the end of a sentence “ought to be determined not by the speaker’s pausing for breath, or by a stroke (the act or an instance of striking, as with the fist, a weapon, or a hammer) interposed (to place between)by a copyist, but by the constraint of the rhythm”.
And though the Romans had experimented for a while with separating·words·with·dots, by the second century CE they had abandoned that too. The cult (a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing,person, ideal, etc)of public speaking was a strong one, to the extent that all reading was done aloud: most scholars (a learned or erudite person, especially one who has profound knowledge of a particular subject)agree that the Greeks and Romans got round their lack of punctuation by murmuring (a low, continuous sound, as of a brook, the wind, or trees, or of low,indistinct voices)aloud as they read through texts of all kinds.
Source :BBC
