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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