Article on :- Punctuation
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PUNCTUATION
punctuation marks are used for the correct pronunciation of the sentences.
for ex , colon semi colon , full stop, question mark, etc.
so that one may not get confused in there meaning.without punctuation marks nobody would be able to understand the meanings of the sentences that what they are trying to say. so it is a basic requirement of grammar in order to understand it well.
if we do not make correct use of these punctuation marks then we will not be able to got the correct mean of the sentences.
at last we can conclude that without punctuation Marks a language is nothing.
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ISSUE 9 | PUNCTUATION
A history of punctuation in English
by Ashley Timms on December 28, 2016
Have you ever stopped and wondered why we mark our texts with symbols such as commas, question marks, and the like? Of course, we all seem to recognise and understand punctuation with ease. Unlike a word we’ve never seen, your listeners would be none the wiser if you came across a new and unrecognisable piece of punctuation while reading aloud. But, why is it that we have both a colon and a semicolon? Whether or not you know of their purpose, you’re able to determine and adjust your speech and reading comprehension when you see one. You can also recognise when some punctuation just isn’’t right. Perhaps your appreciation for punctuation is all but non-existent or maybe you secretly love the Oxford comma. Regardless, punctuation in English has a rich and surprising history from the full stop to the semicolon and even quotation marks.
General history
Keith Houston of the BBC has a rather intricate and detailed timeline for this history of punctuation (which this article will follow). As he notes, the earliest prominent use of any punctuation was in the 3rd century BC. Aristophanes had offered a solution to the completely run-on writing style of the Greeks, which featured spaces between letters, words, clauses, or sentences. Aristophanes proposed that writers use three types of dots to allocate the appropriate pause between formal parts of speech. A dot located in the bottom denoted a short pause like a comma, the middle was for an intermediate pause like a colon, and the bottom was for a pause much like a full stop. With this, a reader would know when to pause and for how long to produce cohesive and understandable speech.
Alas, the Aristophanean method was eventually scrapped when the Roman empire gained precedence over the Greeks from their politics to their writing. The Romans, namely Cicero, believed the speaker should exert discretion over his or her rhythm of speech and not be bound by dots or punctuation.
In the 7th century, Isidore of Seville resurrected the dots originally proposed by Aristophanes. His most famous work, ‘The Etymologies’ (or Etymologiae in Latin), covered a diverse range of topics including geometry, music, cities, animals, and, of course, grammar. It was in this writing that he presented an updated version of the Aristophanean system. He went beyond the simple method of dots denoting pauses and attached more significant meaning to each dot: the highest dot marked the end of a sentence while the lowest dot functioned much like a comma does today. The work of Isidore of Seville was widely respected and he was even cited by Dante Alighieri and quoted by Geoffrey Chaucer. Etymologiae was treated as a textbook through the Middle Ages and no doubt had a profound effect on how writers used grammar and punctuation.
Just like learners of new languages, users of punctuation have since elaborated on the dot system Aristophanes first invented in order to produce even more useful and distinguishing meanings today. According to Keith Houston, music was a major influence for punctuation because musical notation used symbols like the breve and caesura to indicate notes and rests—a necessary component of written language to determine pauses.
One example, which comes from Gregorian chants, is the punctus elevatas which serves as our modern-day colon. With each symbol offering more precise meaning than the last, the originally proposed by Aristophanes eventually faded into history as their usage diminshed. However, the use of a single dot held its ground and retained a meaning of pause (albeit for an unspecified amount of time). (Interestingly, modern spoken transcriptions in linguistics are often annotated with a period to indicate pauses shorter than a second.) As Isidore of Seville released his nuances, an Italian by the name of Boncampagno da Sigla proposed a similar punctuation system but chose the slash (/) to indicate a pause.
Evolution of symbols / punctuation?
The question mark (?) made its way into standard usage in the 15th century and was known has the punctus interrogatives (‘point of interrogation’ in Latin). There are some theories on how the shape of the question mark came about; Oxford Dictionaries offers the theory that it began as a dot with a rising tilde (. ~) to denote the upward inflection. Just like many of our letters and words, this theory states that the symbol transformed into the shape it is today due to the vast amount of users approximating its shape in writing. Another theory from Oxford Dictionaries states that the lowercase “q” and “o” from the Latin qvaestio (‘question’) were combined and eventually transformed into the swirl and dot that we know of today.