The Fading Art of the Language of Language
Zach Mainzer
A significant slice of the school population has probably sent or received the text that goes something like “omg i cant understand the math homework someone pls help me”. No periods, commas, or apostrophes. Just the ideas that need to be expressed. But punctuation plays a key role in both spoken and written language, separating a complex of words into distinct ideas and indicating the necessary pauses in a sentence. “Someone pls help me” with a period just indicates a need for help, but “someone pls help me” followed by six exclamation marks connotes a slightly elevated level of urgency.
Sometimes, punctuation can even change the function of words in a sentence. Here’s one example of how punctuation can make a difference: “He eats shoots and leaves” could describe a panda’s eating habits, but “he eats, shoots, and leaves” could tell the story of a restaurant crime scene (first made familiar by the book Eats, Shoots, and Leaves). You’ve probably also heard of the commas preventing thousands of people from eating their grandmas (“let’s eat, grandma,” versus “let’s eat grandma”) and baking their families (“I like baking, my family, and my friends” versus “I like baking my family and my friends”). Any way you look at it, punctuation communicates its own world of ideas, like the groupings of words together and the purpose and inflection of the sentence. These are completely outside the scope of the expression of the words alone. To illustrate that words pale in comparison to punctuation, there is a possible English sentence in which the word “had” appears 11 times consecutively, only formed and molded into a somewhat coherent sentence using punctuation. (“James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher” becomes “James, while John had had ‘had’, had had ‘had had’; “had had” had had a better effect on the teacher,” a sentence about two English students describing a past event no longer taking place.)
But while you ponder that, let’s dive into how punctuation came into existence. The first recorded use of punctuation dates back to Ancient Greek plays, where playwrights would use two dots or three dots to indicate pauses in the script. Aristophanes later developed this into a system using dots of various heights to indicate the end of a subclause (called a komma), a full clause (kolon), and a sentence (periodos).
Various systems of demarcating pauses and inflection were regionally developed and were particularly useful in the realm of dictating the reading of religious texts. These systems showed remarkable creativity, some using increasing amounts of a mark (like this significant pause: ⁙) to indicate the magnitude of a pause, while others developed a plethora of symbols to indicate these pauses (like ⳼ and ⸓, for example). But all of the methods used were primarily oratory in nature; they indicated the tones and pauses a reader should use and did not necessarily separate ideas.
Since each system was developed regionally without much input from other areas of the world, the invention of printing threw a wrench in the history of punctuation. Once printing took off, ideas could travel quickly in writing, and people relied less heavily on retrieving spoken information. So it was time for new punctuation to come to town. But which system? There were hundreds of systems of punctuation previously used, but readers were only familiar with the one to which they were accustomed.
Today’s punctuation is fairly standard, though it is not universal. Most languages written right to left have a backward question mark (؟), and Spanish has inverted punctuation marks (¿ and ¡). But certainly, every language has its own standardized rules for punctuation. But by 1566, a standardized method of punctuation had developed throughout to make key syntax clarifications.
Ironically, punctuation has sharply degenerated since its glory days during the beginning of the printing age. Who would have ever thought of such a brilliant symbol as the question mark, a symbol expressing the difference between an ordinary statement and uncontrollable bewilderment? And the exclamation mark rocks, too! But as the world expands its horizons of writing to less formal environments, punctuation might be the martyr of de-formalization. In many of today’s contexts, it is acceptable to write without any attempt at proper punctuation, especially in the world of texting.
Punctuation has helped many readers over the last 500 years, and we can better evaluate a piece of writing based on the unwritten details that punctuation gives us. When I get the sans-punctuation text, it is sometimes very difficult to decipher whether the text was a statement or a question. Punctuation helps readers, and I sure hope it doesn’t go out of use.
So on that note, happy punctuating!
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