I'm just forwarding this off the Buffalo List as it has a certain relevance
to the recent thread on silent reading, and also saves me a lot of typing.
david b
----- Original Message -----
From: Aaron Belz <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2001 3:50 PM
Subject: Re: overlooked "censorship" (semi-colons)
> I forwarded Richard Taylor's entertaining screed to a friend and received
> this in response. We should all find it instructive, if not even a bit
> poetic. -Aaron
>
> *****
>
> Richard Taylor wrote, re: the semicolon:
>
> > whose birth iinto literature was as mysterious (and today for most
> > souls) as mystifying, as The Word itself
>
> I beg to differ. The birth of the semicolon is clearly attested in the
> manuscript tradition of Latin-speaking Europe. While in some manuscripts
> of antiquity words were separated by medial points (Latin _punctus_, hence
> our "punctuation"), most Latin books were written continuously--i.e., with
> no spaces between words, and no punctuation. While some, such as the
> 4th-century grammarian Donatus and the 6th-century patron of monastic
> learning Cassiodorus, suggested a system based on the Greek model, in
> which short rhetorical sections (called _commas_) were marked by a medial
> point, longer sections (_colons_) by a point after the bottom of the last
> letter, and the longest sections (_periodus_) by a point after the top of
> the last letter, punctuation was abandoned for the most part until the
> Carolingian period (with the notable exception of the system suggested by
> Isidore of Seville [d. 636], in which sections ended with points at the
> top or bottom of the line, while sentences ended with a group of two or
> three points, one of which might be a comma rather than a simple point).
> It was under the direction of Charlemagne and his advisor, Alcuin of York,
> that the Carolingians developed a miniscule script and a system of
> punctuation that are the ancestors of the script and punctuation we use
> today. In addition to the interior stops of a sentence indicated by
> medial points or periods and the groups of points used to indicate the end
> of sentences, the _punctus elevatus_ (a period with an apostrophe above
> it) and the _punctus interrogativus_ (our question mark) were employed in
> order to facilitate the reading of texts. While these marks of
> punctuation have undergone significant modification since the 8th century,
> and while they have developed differently in various regions (note, for
> example, the French use of guillemets >> << instead of quotation marks to
> indicate direct speech) they nevertheless can be looked to as the direct
> predecessors of the punctuation we use today. The _punctus elevatus_,
> which was introduced to indicate a pause greater than that of a comma,
> but not a full stop, along with an inflection of a voice--the sort of
> pregnant pause one might want to employ inbetween sentences that treat
> closely related ideas--is the predecessor of our semicolon.
>
> There ... that's not mysterious at all, is it? And see ... those
> paleography classes I've taken really were worth something after all.
>
> pax vobiscum,
>
> JDH
>
> ps: By the way, I think it is interesting that for much of its history
> punctuation existed for elocutionary purposes. It was really only in the
> late 16th century that it was suggested that it ought to be employed for
> syntactical ends. I'm sure that's somehow related to the fact that for
> most of the history of the written word, people only read out loud. That
> makes sense for all of the texts that were written continuously--the only
> way you can figure out what they are saying is if you sound them out--and
> also would explain why, when punctuation was introduced, it was for the
> benefit of reading aloud (silent reading didn't become common until the
> later Middle Ages). I've heard it suggested that poets and writers of
> fiction still tend to apply punctuation in an elocutionary manner, while
> us non-fiction drones tend to be constrained by syntactical models. Fair
> to say?
>
> --------------------------------------
> J. Derek Halvorson
> Loyola University Chicago
> Department of History
> http://homepages.luc.edu/~jhalvor/
> [log in to unmask]
>
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