Why does incorrect punctuation make people so angry?
World renowned linguistics authority David Crystal says the supposed “innovations” brought about by texting and social media – abbreviations, omitted letters, ideograms, nonstandard spellings – have been part of the English language for centuries.
Crystal is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a hundred books about language, the latest being Making a Point: The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation.
The book examines the history of punctuation from 500 AD and the use of “camel case” in Old English ToMarkTheBeginningsOfNewWords, to Jay Z’s decision to drop the hyphen from his name.
Ed’s note: “The big thing about language is that it always changes,” Crystal tells The New Yorker, and this is my continual mental reply to internet pedants. At the same time, I was relieved to discover that the book is only titled Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation in the US: that “s” in “persnickety” almost gave me hives.
Read an interview with Crystal from The New Yorker:
“There are two extreme views about punctuation,” he writes, “the first is that you dont actually need it because its perfectly possible to write down what you want to say without any punctuation marks or capital letters and people can still read it youdontevenneedspacesbetweenwordsreally.” The second view is that punctuation is essential, not only to avoid ambiguity but also because it “shows our identity as educated people.” Crystal walks the reader through the history of punctuation, from scriptura continua—that is, words written without spaces between them—to the more punctuated present. In Old English manuscripts, punctuation is idiosyncratic; to denote word divisions, writers tried a variety of strategies: dots, spaces, “camel case” (that is, using capital letters rather than spaces ToMarkTheBeginningsOfNewWords). Then the rise of printing created the demand for a standardized system.
Read an excerpt from Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation
Word-spaces are the norm today; but it wasn’t always so. It’s not difficult to see why. We don’t actually need them to understand language. We don’t use them when we speak, and fluent readers don’t put pauses between words as they read aloud. Read this paragraph out loud, and you’ll probably pause at the commas and full stops, but you won’t pause between the words. They run together. So, if we think of writing purely as a way of putting speech down on paper, there’s no reason to think of separating the words by spaces. And that seems to be how early writers thought, for unspaced text (often called, in Latin, scriptura continua) came to be a major feature of early Western writing, in both Greek and Latin. From the first century AD we find most texts throughout the Roman Empire without words being separated at all. It was thus only natural for missionaries to introduce unspaced writing when they arrived in England.
Writing in antiquity was viewed by most people as a guide to reading aloud. Today, we tend to read silently, privately, rapidly. We can skim through text if we wish, omitting portions. In early Greek and Roman civilization, people routinely read aloud to audiences in displays of oratory, every syllable was valued, and eloquence was highly rated. No skimming then. A text would have been well prepared before being read in public, so that it became more like a musical score, reminding the reader what to say next. In such circumstances, experienced readers wouldn’t need word-spaces or other marks. Some influential writers, indeed, poured scorn on punctuation. Cicero, for example, thought that the rhythm of a well-written sentence was enough to tell someone how to bring it to an effective close. Punctuation marks were unnecessary.
But without punctuation of any kind, readers would have to do their homework to avoid unexpected miscues. We would have to do our homework too, if we had no word-spacing today. Faced with the sentence
therapistsneedspecialtreatment
we need to know if this is a text about sex crimes or about speech pathology before we can correctly read it aloud. Early writers on oratory and rhetoric, such as Aristotle and Quintilian, often illustrated the dangers of misreading an unpunctuated text, and stressed the need for good preparation. Familiarity, they hoped, would breed content.
We can carry out an experiment to show how familiarity with a text helps our reading of it, even if it is unspaced. Take a text you know well, and write it down without word-spaces, then try reading it aloud. Like this:
tobeornottobethatisthequestion
ourfatherwhoartinheavenhallowedbethyname
jackandjillwentupthehilltofetchapailofwater
Our knowledge of the content enables us to read it quickly. But with a bit more effort we can do this even if we don’t know the text in advance. In fact, this is something we’re increasingly doing these days, as a result of the Internet. Domain names don’t use word-spaces. Consider the following addresses:
www.davidcrystal.com
www.iloveshakespeare.com
www.thisisanexampleofapossiblelongdomainname.com
It may take us a millisecond or two longer to read these strings, but we can do it. Scriptura continua is back!
Book details
- Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation by David Crystal
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EAN: 9781250060419
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- Making a Point: The Pernickity Story of English Punctuation by David Crystal
EAN: 9781781253502
Find this book with BOOK Finder!