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
> _______________________________________________
>
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