Dear Bert. It is not forgotten, believe me. Tell Anne to dust off her copy. tpr
----- Original Message -----
From: "A.C. Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Saturday, September 30, 2006 5:08 pm
Subject: Re: Renaissance Punctuation
To: [log in to unmask]
> For a study of Renaissance punctuation, one might well begin with
> the
> entry by Fred Nichols on Punctuation in the now forgotten Spenser
> Encyclopedia. In his brief bibliography, he cites three studies.
> Bert
>
>
> At 02:11 PM 30/09/2006, you wrote:
> >I know that the late Fred Nichols was an authority on 16th century
> >punctuation as well as on Neolatin, but I'm not sure if he wrote
> much. I
> >once asked him about the comma after "perfecte paterne of a
> Poete" (so
> >often misread by my students as meaning a pattern of a perfect
> poet)--the
> >sentence would make better sense to me if that's an early modern
> comma, or
> >in other words one that indicates a nanosecond of breathing and
> not a
> >syntactic pause of the sort we would make. Elizabethans would use
> commas>where we wouldn't. In this case, the sense would be "a
> perfect pattern of
> >a poet who's pissed off because he isn't getting funded." Fred
> said he
> >thought I might have a point in not having a comma, so to speak, but
> >didn't direct me to anything he had written. Anne.
> >
> > > I don't know of such a study, but I know a little about possible
> > > sources for it. The TCP transcriptions of EEBO let you, if you
> are so
> > > inclined, find out about the punctuation habits of particular
> texts.> > I read somewhere that Sidney was inordinately fond of
> parentheses in
> > > the Arcadia and wondered what facts this was based on. I
> happen to
> > > have a lot of those texts in a database environment and ran a
> test on
> > > the Arcadia. It turns out that the Arcadia is in the 99th
> percentile> > of texts in its use of parentheses. The average
> across the TCP is
> > > something like 4 per 10,000 words, the figures for the Arcadia are
> > > close to 30.
> > >
> > > As often with digital analyses, you don't really learn
> anything new.
> > > But you get much firmer and more precise evidence of what you
> sort of
> > > knew. In Sidney's case, this seems to me genuninely
> interesting. The
> > > parenthetical style is clearly indicative of pretty deep narrative
> > > habits, and a look at parentheses or m-dashes might bring out some
> > > stylistic properties of a text very clearly.
> > >
> > >
> > > On Sep 30, 2006, at 12:46 PM, HANNIBAL HAMLIN wrote:
> > >
> > >> Dear Learned Colleagues,
> > >>
> > >> Does anyone know of a study of punctuation in the English
> > >> Renaissance? Something discussing what exactly (or
> inexactly) a
> > >> comma or colon or exclamation mark means? I may be missing
> > >> something, but I don't recall ever seeing such. Perhaps it's so
> > >> remote from being a hot topic that no one has done it. Are there
> > >> Renaissance works that treat punctuation, in and amongst other
> > >> rhetorical matters? Hmm.
> > >>
> > >> Many thanks,
> > >>
> > >> Hannibal
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> Hannibal Hamlin
> > >> Associate Professor of English
> > >> The Ohio State University
> > >
>
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