<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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