Author: Curt Doolittle

THE EVOLUTION OF PUNCTUATION.

(the economics of writing materials)

Um. First, to get a bit of insult out of the way, he isn’t exactly writing about the intersections of complex topics, his PhD is in ‘interdisciplinary studies’. Meaning, it’s the equivalent of a high school diploma. Not much more than a means of fund-raising for weak departments.

Second, quite the contrary, he DOES use punctuation: ample use of space to mark verbal pauses. In fact, spaces and new lines are all that are necessary for the comprehension of the written word. The comma, apostrophe,

He should try to write with only spaces as punctuation, in E-prime (eliminating conflation between actor, observer, and experiencer; and eliminating ‘cheating’ conflation defining the existential properties of statements) and then I might take him more seriously.

If we look at contemporary programming languages (Python) we see the abandonment of punctuation in favor of spaces and line breaks.

The original reason for punctuation are fairly obvious:

1) writing materials, people who could write, were originally terribly expensive.

2) writing was originally limited to very simple and familiar topics, so comprehension was not difficult.

3) most characters were originally pictographic.

For these three reasons, writing was dense.

But a problem arises as writing becomes more complicated, and not just a vehicle for business transactions, and the issuance of laws.

It had to be able not to record transactions, but to record speech.

—-”Punctuation is historically an aid to reading aloud.”—-

—-”The Greeks were sporadically using punctuation marks consisting of vertically arranged dots—usually two (dicolon) or three (tricolon)—in around the 5th century b.c. as an aid in the oral delivery of texts.” —-

hypostigmḗ – a low punctus on the baseline to mark off a komma (unit smaller than a clause);

stigmḕ mésē – a punctus at midheight to mark off a clause (kōlon); and

stigmḕ teleía – a high punctus to mark off a sentence (periodos).[6]

—-”formal written modern English differs subtly from spoken English because not all emphasis and disambiguation is possible to convey in print, even with punctuation.”—-

In phonetic languages, it is much easier to read volumes of text if there are spaces between the words. The same problem does not exist in pictorial characters which the entire meaning is embedded in the glyph.

In modern writing, besides assisting in clarifying the text, punctuation makes it somewhat easier to scan rather than read (burdensome) text, so that if a concept is understood, one can easily move to the next. Most of us who read a great deal (for a living), skim the first sentence of paragraphs to search for something we might not already know, rather than burn time and energy on the author’s repetition of the obvious.

So, the argument against this particular PhD student, (whose protest is noted) is that without punctuation we are trapped in his horridly pedantic narrative without the ability to search through it for valuable content. In that sense it is like having to listen to some idiot babble for twenty minutes before getting to the point. (In other words, like attending most conferences.)

In high school I felt very frustrated with punctuation because my feeling was very similar to the author’s: a period is obvious, a comma is obvious, and a dash is obvious, and parenthesis are obvious. Paragraphs are not so obvious, and mastering semicolons is something I still wrestle with. But in the end, it’s just an increasing set of pauses to inform the reader how to read out loud.

But there is nothing ‘colonial’ about punctuation: The greeks used it. And the same technique has remained with us. Because it’s necessary.