Some articles
Here are a couple of articles I’ve recently stumbled across. These might be of interest to the budding grammarians (snoots?) in our class: First, a piece from the Chicago Tribune about the difference between lay v. lie. By a Pomona alum!
 Lying Down in Crusade for CorrectnessÂ
 Second, a piece from Monday’s New York Times about the semicolon (complete with a Chomsky quote and a hilarious edit at the end)
Celebrating the SemicolonÂ
The second piece got me thinking about punctuation and the rules we have for using it. These rules apply certain ways in different situations (an em-dash instead of a semicolon in news articles, for example, or the vagaries of text message punctuation). We’ve talked in class a lot about changing sounds of words and changing vocabularies, but very little about changing rules of punctuation. When did punctuation as we know it become standardized? Its interesting that we concern ourselves with the pronunciation of OE, an aural exercise, when the evidence we have for it is written (and, therefore, punctuated). Â
Stephanie wrote:
I’m an “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” fan myself, so I certainly agree about the hilarity of the last edit (especially as missing that comma destroys the entire point of the title).
As for the punctuation question, I (vaguely) remember reading about this (probably in Truss’ book, actually). I think the reason we haven’t talked about punctuation change much is that until the advent of printing, there wasn’t a lot of punctuation to speak of. If you look at some of the facsimile examples of OE and even ME texts in Freeborn and Crystal, for example, there seem to be issues in capitalization, spacing between sentences, and so on that hadn’t yet been concretely worked out.
So, remembering the history of punctuation and printing only vaguely, I went to Wikipedia (admittedly not the best source, but it can be useful). In its section on the history of punctuation (here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#History), Wikipedia has this to say:
“The use of punctuation was not standardized until after the invention of printing. Credit for introducing a standard system is generally given to Aldus Manutius and his grandson. They popularized the practice of ending sentences with the colon or full stop, invented the semicolon, made occasional use of parentheses, and created the modern comma by lowering the virgule.[2]”
That seems to resonate with what I remember reading, so I’d guess it’s at least decently accurate.
I think there are some interesting questions around this issue, though. Did standardized punctuation have to wait not only for printing, but also for a standardized dialect and orthography? And were there features of “punctuation” in OE/ME that presage what we use today?
Posted 20 Feb 2008 at 9:51 pm ¶
amelia wrote:
Has anyone else noticed a tendency for modern people to use commas instead of em-dashes, colons and semicolons? When did this punctuation conflation begin? Using an em-dash or a semicolon now feels conspicuously formal—I hardly ever do so except in academic writing.
Looking back at the fascimiles of OE and ME texts, the punctuation doesn’t seem to have much in common with PDE standards, and I wonder if punctuation had to arise after the shift that made English into an analytical language. The inflectional endings of OE could have delineated some of the relationships between clauses currently indicated by punctuation. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s format of beginning each sentence with “and,†putting periods between the elements of lists, and seemingly having dependant clauses stand alone is disorienting to present-day english speakers, and seems like an unlikely way for people to have spoken during the Old English period. I wonder if the historical scribal tradition reflected an earlier oral precedant, perhaps with a more stylized format to distinguish it from everyday speech.
Posted 21 Feb 2008 at 9:29 am ¶