The English Project's History of English Punctuation

Abstract

The mission of the English Project (www.englishproject.org) is to explore and explain the English language in order to educate and entertain the English speaker, and 2015 was the year of punctuation for the Project because 6 February 2015 was the 500th anniversary of the death of Aldus Manutius. Aldus was a Venetian printer who shaped the comma, invented the semicolon and created italic fonts. He may have been the greatest punctuator of all time. We ‘punctuated’ the year by looking in turn at the full stop, the semicolon, the colon, the comma, the slash, the hyphen, the parenthesis, the exclamation, the apostrophe, the quotation mark and the question mark. Those twelve provide the fundamentals of English language punctuation, and all of them do more than one job. If we had a complete and unambiguous set of punctuation marks, we might need as many as 50, but the writing world does not want the trouble of such precision. In just same way, the writing world has never accepted the need for 44 separate letters to match the 44 separate sounds of the English language. Providing a separate grapheme (letter) for every phoneme (sound) is the linguist's business. Punctuation marks are ambiguous therefore. They suggest rather than define. They rely on context and the quick wittedness of the reader. If precision is needed, there are proofreader's marks. Merriam-Webster lists 42 of them, but proofreading is a special practice. Punctuation marks are a special set of symbols, and of symbols and signs there is no end. Punctuation marks are regularly appropriated by the devisers of computer languages. Punctuation marks can become logotypes – ‘a single piece of type that prints a word’. The exclamation mark can be made to work like &, $, or @. There are fuzzy edges to the subject of punctuation.