Could you expand on this, Chris?
(As a caveat, I should have noted that I was thinking primarily of
written/printed *English texts.)
I first came on the problem when I noticed the difference between MS Wyatt
poems and the printed Tottel text.
It proved surprisingly difficult quite to pin down what was happening (and
my earlier post was, I admit, over-assertive <g>) but my current feeling is
that manuscripts reflect the spoken word. Thus they have virgules (forward
slashes) and dots, on occasion.
(As Rosemary Huisman notes in _The written poem_, Old English poetry didn't
even represent line endings in the written text.)
This seems to be independent of the mode of composition -- given the nature
of the complexity of some of the verse forms he uses, I can't imagine Wyatt
*composing orally, but nevertheless the Egerton MS, save for the occasional
virgule, is virtually unpunctuated.
This links into, of course, the apostrophe argument -- you *can pronounce a
semi-colon (it indicates a voice-pause, if you're thinking in terms of
rhetorical rather than logical punctuation), whereas any phonetic
distinction between "its" and "it's" [and "your" and "you're", et alia] is
only and entirely orthographic.
The dividing-line is (in England) surprisingly abrupt -- with Wyatt, falling
between the MS texts in the 1520s and the printed text of Tottel's
Miscellany in 1558.
My most recent encounter with this is Robert Copland's _Highway to the
Spittal House_, printed [sic!] c. 1530, and usually dismissed as <quote>
doggerel <unquote>. My own reaction was to think that Copland was simply
reflecting pre-existing MS conventions, and if you read the poem as if it
were in manuscript, then it made perfect sense.
Which is odd in that Copland wasn't just a poet and translator, but also a
professional printer, having been an intern with Wynkin de Worde.
I'm not happy with what I managed to learn about this over the course of
years (which was harder than I thought -- I'd assumed that someone,
somewhere would have done a proper documentation of the issue) which is why
I'd appreciate an expansion of Chris's dismissal.
As to the similar dismissal by the ever-estivating 4Bear, I simply consign
this to the printer's devil. <g>
Robin
From: "Christopher Walker" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Inverted commas and such
> <snip>
> Punctuation only appeared after the introduction of printing.
> <snip>
>
> Not so, of course.
>
> CW
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