Abstract
AbstractIn German printings of the early 18th century, the shift from the hitherto dominant sentence-dividing punctuation mark, the virgule, to the comma, takes place astonishingly rapidly. It is also astonishing that until recently, research has barely devoted itself to this phenomenon, even though it is at least a turning point in the history of the highest-frequency punctuation mark in German writing.The paper examines to what extent the transition from the use of the virgule to the comma is carried out in a phase-specific manner. Previous samples have indicated the influence of the font choice on the choice of punctuation: Printers or typesetters in the early 18th century set the comma especially in the environment of the Antiqua script, which is used to graphically label non-native words or syntagms. Is this a kind of “gateway” to the comma?By means of a corpus analysis in micro-diachronic sections, the status of the virgule/comma variation will be associated with the typographic variation in terms of the use of Latin Antiqua type and the German type.
Highlights
The paper examines to what extent the transition from the use of the virgule to the comma is carried out in a phase-specific manner
If you search for the term “virgule” in the rule parts for punctuation in orthographic codes of contemporary German, you will search in vain
It is no longer used as a punctuation mark to shape the internal structure of sentences, as it was the case in the 18th century
Summary
If you search for the term “virgule” in the rule parts for punctuation in orthographic codes of contemporary German, you will search in vain. It is no longer used as a punctuation mark to shape the internal structure of sentences, as it was the case in the 18th century. It had been the most frequently used punctuation mark for centuries. The surprisingly rapid change from the virgule to the comma in the 18th century was for a long time hardly acknowledged in research. This may be due to the teleologically-oriented tradition of codex and standard language research, where the goal – the standard language – and not the path to it was the focus of attention. It is only in recent years that Rinas (2017), Kirchhoff (2017) and most recently Rössler and Froschmayer (2019), Ringlstetter (2019) and Lemke (2020) examined the rapid change from virgule to comma in the 18th century in more detail with corpus-based analyses (for details see Section 3). In contrast to the teleological perspective, the genetic perspective (which is the perspective related to the genesis) tries to avoid the distorting “tunnel view” of the later “winners” in the standardization process
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