Punctuation prior to the
development of printing was
light and haphazard. William
Caxton (1474), the first printer
of books in English, used three
punctuation marks: the stroke
(/) for marking word groups,
the colon (:) for marking
distinct syntactic pauses, and
the period (.) for marking the
ends of sentences and brief
pauses. For example,
The thyrde temptation that the
deuyl maketh to theym that
deye. is by Impacyence: that is
ayenste charyte/ For by
charyte ben holden to loue god
abouve alle thynges.
(modern form)
The third temptation that the
Devil makes to them that die is
by Impatience; that is against
charity. For by charity be
holden to love God above all
things.
Clearly the use of a period for
brief pauses as well as full
stops at the ends of sentences
was inconvenient and writers
soon stopped so using it.
Tyndale's Gospels(1535)
eliminated that practice and
other ambiguities of Caxton's
system of punctuation. Soon
after Tyndale the comma
replaced the stroke. The
semicolon was introduced at
that time.
Early seventeenth century
writers appeared to use colons,
semicolons, and commas
interchangably. Their use
depended upon pauses for
breath rather than the
syntactic structure of the
sentence.
Writers of the late seventeenth
century tried to establish
precise rules for the use of the
comma, semicolon and colon,
on the principles that a
semicolon indicated a pause
twice as long as that for a
comma, and a colon indicated a
pause twice as long as for a
semicolon. Some grammarians
rebelled at such artificial rules.
One grammarian of later times,
Justin Brenan, wrote,
What a quantity of useless
controversial stuff has been
written upon the proper use of
the semicolon and the colon --
but I am wrong in saying that it
was useless for, at last,
common sense prevailed and
the public threw these stops
overboard.
Brenan himself wanted to
substitute the dash (−) for the
colon. As he expressed it, "No
one of good taste could use any
other stop." Brenan was one of
the first grammarians to argue
that punctuation marks should
not be primarily indicators of
pauses for breath but an
integral part of the sentence
pattern.
The question mark was
originally called a note of
interrogation. There was some
uncertainty in the seventeenth
century as to whether a
question mark should be used
when a question is only
described (an indirect question)
or only used in the case a
question is actually being asked
(a direct question). By the
eighteenth century the
question mark was only being
used for direct questions.
The exclamation mark comes
from the term note of
admiration, in which
admiration referred to its Latin
sense of wonderment. One
theory of its origin is that it was
originally the Latin word for
joy, Io, written with
the I written above the o.
Quotation marks are the most
recently added form of
punctuation, having been
created in the late seventeenth
century. However the use
of bullets for items in a list
verges on being the
introduction of a new
punctuation mark.
In recent times some writers
tried to introduce a new
punctuation mark which is a
combination of the question
and exclamation marks (!? or
?!) to indicate a tone of
shocked disbelief but nothing
much came of it. English could
benefit from the Spanish
system of punctuation marks
preceding a sentence as well as
ending the sentence. Thus a
question is Spanish is preceded
by an inverted question mark
and an exclamation by an
inverted exclamation mark.