The oldest known document using punctuation is the Mesha Stele (9th century BC). This employs points between the words and horizontal strokes between the sense section as punctuation.
Asterism
It's also known as a triple asterisk. People have used asterisms to mark part of a text, or to indicate minor breaks (e.g., scene changes within a chapter in a novel). But this punctuation mark is rare these days, with a line of three or more asterisks more common.
The cult of public speaking was a strong one, to the extent that all reading was done aloud: most scholars agree that the Greeks and Romans got round their lack of punctuation by murmuring aloud as they read through texts of all kinds.
Ancient Greeks did not use to indicate punctuation in their texts, apart from very exceptional cases; nor did they use to separate words with spaces, as we do.
The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages.
All of the Greek New Testament originals were written in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS with no spaces and probably no punctuation, and all of the earlier manuscripts are in this style, whether on parchment or papyrus.
Although spoken Greek and Latin did use punctuation to tell words apart, scriptio continua was used to save space and ink. Use of scriptio continua became less common after the fall of the Roman Empire, and spaces began to appear between words.
By the fifth century BC, Greek playwrights were using some basic symbols to show where actors should pause, and the scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium (c257– c185 BC) invented a formal system of punctuation.
The first book to be printed with modern punctuation was Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy (中國哲學史大綱) by Hu Shih (胡適), published in 1919. Traditional poetry and calligraphy maintains the punctuation-free style.
While the comma is the most difficult with 15 applications, the period is the easiest—its only job is to end a sentence (except when it ends an abbreviation: Mr., Mrs., Dr., etc.).
Chinese is the language in which punctuation are not used.
Scriptio continua (Latin for "continuous script"), also known as scriptura continua or scripta continua, is a style of writing without spaces or other marks between the words or sentences. The form also lacks punctuation, diacritics, or distinguished letter case.
4) William Faulkner
Unlike Emily Dickinson, some writers used no punctuation at all! One of them was William Faulkner, a grand American novelist and Nobel Prize laureate, who, in the manner of stream of consciousness, loved to challenge his readers to tackle his sometimes confusing writings.
2 Here are the most common punctuation mistakes that people do while writing: 2.1 Not using Period or Full stop. 2.2 Overusing Commas. 2.3 Not closing Quotation marks. 2.4 Apostrophe not facing the right way.
Percontation point
) , a reversed question mark later referred to as a rhetorical question mark, was proposed by Henry Denham in the 1580s and was used at the end of a question that does not require an answer—a rhetorical question.
A Bit Of Background To Chinese Punctuation
When written like this, Classical Chinese did not use punctuation. However, some symbols were sometimes used to clarify the meaning of texts. However, these were added later to aid comprehension, and the punctuation wasn't considered an integral part of the text itself.
Yes, there is punctuation in Chinese. Some Chinese punctuation is used in the same way as it is in English/the West, however some is unique to Chinese. Do you use question marks in Chinese? Yes, question marks are used in Chinese and their usage is very similar to that in the West.
And, wouldn't you know it, punctuation exists in Japanese as well! It's not that much different from English punctuation, but there are definitely a few things to keep in mind if you want to read Japanese more easily or one day get into Japanese translation.
Thai, Lao, and Khmer are languages that are written with no spaces between words. Spaces do occur, but they serve as phrase delimiters, rather than word delimiters. However, when Thai, Lao, or Khmer text reaches the end of a line, the expectation is that text is wrapped a word at a time.
Latin essentially “died out” with the fall of the Roman Empire, but in reality, it transformed — first into a simplified version of itself called Vulgar Latin, and then gradually into the Romance languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian. Thus, Classical Latin fell out of use.
Why is that? First, there are no native speakers of Latin. Latin, the language spoken in Ancient Rome, developed and changed over time until it turned into different languages, e.g., French, Italian, and Spanish.
Hebrew punctuation is similar to that of English and other Western languages, Modern Hebrew having imported additional punctuation marks from these languages in order to avoid the ambiguities sometimes occasioned by the relative paucity of such symbols in Biblical Hebrew.
As mentioned above, at first the Christian Church was largely made up of speakers of Greek. The original missions, outside of Palestine, were conducted among fellow Greek-speaking Jews, but quickly expanded to Gentiles as well. All the books of the New Testament were written originally in Greek.
The Greeks first used punctuation marks around the 5th century BC. In addition, the Romans occasionally used symbols to indicate pauses in the 1st century BC, and by the AD 4th century, punctuation became prevalent. Later on, other languages continued to develop their own forms of punctuation as well.