Geez, I might have known my old pal, Stephen Reimer would fit in
here... Good for UofA.
Doug
On 22-Jan-09, at 2:00 PM, Robin Hamilton wrote:
> Many thanks, Chris!!!
>
> I'll rather selfishly rip-out what is useful to my purposes. <g>
>
> I have two issues around this -- the general one of the relation of
> manuscripts to oral delivery, and a more specific one around just
> what the hell is happening in English printing between 1530 and 1560.
>
> What you say below clarifies things in my mind, but finally drives
> me deeper into my already wild and wayward conjecture. <g>
>
> First, would it be useful to distinguish a more specific term
> ("punctuation") from a more general one ("pointing")?
>
> {Reading through -- well, on [as usual] the third reading -- what
> you said below, it occurred to me to google <punctuation pointing>,
> and I came on a rather nice piece that says a lot:
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~sreimer/ms-course/course/punc.htm }
>
> Crudely, to give you something to shoot down, would it be fair to
> say that MS pointing reflects the spoken word, tends to mark larger
> or smaller blocks of text, and thus, with the appearance of linear
> layout in early printed texts, actually leads in the first instance
> to a *reduction of what we would now think of as "punctuation"?
>
> {As an aside, I'm intrigued by the way in which the issue turns on
> not the spoken vs. the written but on MS vs. printed texts.}
>
> This would seem to me to make sense of the way in which the
> earliest English printed texts actually contain *less pointing [sic]
> than the immediately previous MSS -- lineation is used in place of
> pointing to indicate blocks of a larger or lesser extent, nah?
>
> <Thus you get the weird situation of Wyatt in Egerton writing [sic]
> a text which fuses the earlier MS conventions, with an overlay of
> the effect of Guttenberg, leading to the use of lineation, together
> with, save the occasional virgule, virtually no pointing whatsover.>
>
> Also, of course, lineation works as a disambiguating factor in
> poetry more than prose -- perhaps the descriptions should separate
> the two? I don't off-hand have access to Caxton's Reynard and Aesop
> printed texts, but they would obviously be a factor here.
>
> All of which means that I now think I have more of a handle on why
> Copland's printed _Highway_ in 1530 reads as a manuscript.
>
> Then by Tottel in 1558, punctuation (sic!) breaks out, like measles,
> as the printers finally come to terms with the fact that a printed
> text needs a different orthography from earlier MSS which (more
> directly?) reflect the spoken word.
>
> Which is why I originally said that punctuation is a result of the
> printing of texts.
>
> I'm now prepared to admit (which I should have said originally <g>)
> that pointing, to a greater or lesser degree, occurs in MS texts,
> but that punctuation, in the sense we have come to think of it, is a
> result of printing.
>
> ... I'm not sure whether that's any better or clearer on my part,
> but does reflect my response to what you said in your post.
>
> <As a last aside -- I'm not sure about this yet, but I'm inclined to
> think that it's possible to argue that with cant texts found between
> 1660 and 1730, the less punctuation, the more likely the text is to
> represent an oral original.
>
> Unfortunately, my prime example of this, "The Budg and Snudg Song,"
> printed virtually without punctuation in _A Warning to
> Housekeepers_, was earlier printed *with punctuation by Richard
> Head. Bah!!!>
>
> Robin
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Christopher Walker" <[log in to unmask]
> >
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009 9:27 AM
> Subject: Re: Inverted commas and such
>
>
>> <snip>
>> I'd appreciate an expansion of Chris's dismissal.
>> <snip>
>>
>> Sorry. It wasn't a dismissal. I'd assumed you were being mischievous
>> and that I was merely being pedantic and/or ponderous.
>>
>> I ought to know about punctuation: I was taught by an expert. In
>> fact, I
>> don't. So here are some scribbles.
>>
>> <snip>
>> (As a caveat, I should have noted that I was thinking primarily of
>> written/printed *English texts.)
>> <snip>
>>
>> Yes. Foreigners have an effect. But to put the discussion in context,
>> Isidore's *Etymologies* has material about punctuation which is
>> reflected
>> (or reflects) what is found in (later) English material.
>>
>> Broadly, where there is continuous ordering MS punctuation tends
>> to be
>> *pointing*, ie marking up for reading rather than structuring the
>> text in
>> line with the underlying logic. Is confusion possible? Punctuate
>> (but not
>> always). Is it difficult to work out what the sense is? Punctuate
>> (but not
>> always). It is far from being consistent.
>>
>> In OE, for example, there were enlarged initial letters (to
>> indicate new
>> sections) plus various kinds of punctus.
>>
>> In the lowest position (.) the punctus represented a comma;
>> slightly higher,
>> it represented a longer pause; in the highest position (Cf WCW,
>> though he
>> wrote a little later) it represented a period, as did the punctus
>> versus (a
>> sort of 7, dotted at the base; a plain 7 was equivalent to an
>> ampersand).
>> There was also a punctus interrogativus, equivalent to the modern
>> '?'.
>>
>> The punctus was also used (very frequently, though not invariably) to
>> separate half lines in verse. So it's misleading to say that OE
>> 'didn't
>> _even_ represent line endings'. They just weren't spatially ordered.
>>
>> Anyway it all gets messed about with as the years go by and as
>> hands change
>> and develop.
>>
>> Hopping forward to the 12th C and the *Ormulum*, where author and
>> scribe
>> appear to be the same person, you get, for example, the paragraphus
>> (which
>> marks paragraphs) and the positura (like a modern semi colon
>> followed by a
>> raised punctus, which is used to parse clauses), the punctus
>> elevatus (like
>> a modern semi colon flipped upwards on its vertical axis, so that
>> the tail
>> is at the top and back to front, which has a similar function to
>> the semi
>> colon) and dashes used to indicate parentheses.
>>
>> As poetry comes to be spatially ordered, disambiguating punctuation
>> actually
>> reduces (I think) but logical ordering increases. So a paragraphus
>> is used
>> to mark out stanzas, virgules (/) are used to mark caesuras but the
>> punctus
>> elevatus indicates enjambment (the default being endstopping).
>>
>> In the later 13th C Cotton MS of *The Owl and the Nightingale*, the
>> rhymed
>> couplets appear as two lines with a punctus at the end of each
>> line; the
>> punctus elevatus isn't used. However, the poem immediately below it
>> in the
>> MS indicates couplets with a punctus elevatus at the end of the
>> first line
>> and a punctus at the end of the second.
>>
>> And so on.
>>
>> This is tentative and may or may not make some sense.
>>
>> CW
>> _______________________________________________
>>
>> We're not paying for your crisis!
>> (Italian Student Slogan)
>
Douglas Barbour
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http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
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Oh, goddamnit, we forgot the silent prayer.
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