Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood.[1] The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections.[2] The alphabet-based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization, no vowels (see abjad), and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights (such as Euripides and Aristophanes) did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes space between words and the other, historically or currently used, signs.
By the 19th century, the punctuation marks were used hierarchically in terms of their weight.[3] Six marks, proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin, could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis.[4]
In some rare cases, the meaning of a text can be changed substantially with different punctuation, such as in "woman, without her man, is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of men to women), when written "woman: without her, man is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of women to men), instead.[5] Similar changes in meaning can be achieved in spoken forms of most languages by using various elements of speech, such as suprasegmentals. The rules of punctuation vary with language, location, register, and time. Most recently, in online chat and text messages punctuation is used mostly tachygraphically, especially among younger users.
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).
[8]
the "irony point" or "" (point d'ironie: )
irony mark
the "love point" (point d'amour: )
A point d'amour mark, or "love point"
the "conviction point" (point de conviction: )
the "authority point" (point d'autorité: )
the "acclamation point" (point d'acclamation: )
the "doubt point" (point de doute: )
Diacritic
a word puzzle
James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher
the practice of annotating manuscripts with marks set in the margins
Obelism
the category of written conventions that includes punctuation as well as spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, and emphasis
Orthography
abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in Latin
Scribal abbreviations
Terminal punctuation
for typographical details
History of sentence spacing
a system of shorthand that consisted of about 4,000 signs
Houston, Keith (2013). Shady Characters: Ampersands, Interrobangs and other Typographical Curiosities. Particular.
Parkes, Malcolm Beckwith (1993). Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West. University of California Press. 0-520-07941-8.
ISBN
Patt, Sebastian (2013). Punctuation as a Means of Medium-Dependent Presentation Structure in English: Exploring the Guide Functions of Punctuation. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. 978-3-8233-6753-6.
ISBN
– a helpful online resource
Larry Trask: Guide to Punctuation
(in French) – helpful photographs of early punctuation
History of Punctuation
Punctuation Marks in English: Clarity in Expression
Unicode collation charts
Ethiopic script
Automatic Recovery of Capitalization and Punctuation of Automatic Speech Transcripts
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