Some borrowed from musical notation, inspired by Gregorian chants to create new marks like the punctus versus (a medieval ringer for the semicolon used to terminate a sentence) and the punctus elevatus (an upside-down ‘ ’ that evolved into the modern colon) that suggested changes in tone as well as grammatical meaning.
With Aristophanes’ little dots now commonplace, writers began to expand on them. Writing had come of age, and punctuation was an indispensable part of it. And towards the end of the 8th Century, in the nascent country of Germany, the famed king Charlemagne ordered a monk named Alcuin to devise a unified alphabet of letters that could be read by all his far-flung subjects, thus creating what we now know as lowercase letters. Spaces between words appeared soon after this, an invention of Irish and Scottish monks tired of prying apart unfamiliar Latin words. Moreover, Isidore explicitly connected punctuation with meaning for the first time: the re-christened subdistinctio, or low point (.), no longer marked a simple pause but was rather the signpost of a grammatical comma, while the high point, or distinctio finalis ( Later, in the 7th Century, Isidore of Seville (first an archbishop and later beatified to become a saint, though sadly not for his services to punctuation) described an updated version of Aristophanes’ system in which he rearranged the dots in order of height to indicate short (.), medium ( In the 6th Century, Christian writers began to punctuate their own works long before readers got their hands on them in order to protect their original meaning. Books became an integral part of the Christian identity, acquiring decorative letters and paragraph marks (Γ, ¢, 7, ¶ and others), and many were lavishly illustrated with gold leaf and intricate paintings.Īs it spread across Europe, Christianity embraced writing and rejuvenated punctuation. Whereas pagans had always passed along their traditions and culture by word of mouth, Christians preferred to write down their psalms and gospels to better spread the word of God. As the Roman Empire crumbled in the 4th and 5th Centuries, Rome’s pagans found themselves fighting a losing battle against a new religion called Christianity. It was the rise of a quite different kind of cult that resuscitated Aristophanes’ foray into punctuation. 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. dots, by the second century CE they had abandoned that too.It was up to the reader to pick their way through this unforgiving mass of letters to discover where each word or sentence ended and the next began.Īnd though the Romans had experimented for a while with separating For as long as anyone could remember, the Greeks had written their texts so that their letters ran together withnospacesorpunctuation and without any distinction between lowercase and capitals. He was chief of staff at the city’s famous library, home to hundreds of thousands of scrolls, which were all frustratingly time-consuming to read. In the 3rd Century BCE, in the Hellenic Egyptian city of Alexandria, a librarian named Aristophanes had had enough. We would be lost without them (or, at the very least, extremely confused), and yet the earliest readers and writers managed without it for thousands of years. The comma, colon, semicolon and their siblings are integral parts of writing, pointing out grammatical structures and helping us transform letters into spoken words or mental images. If we don’t use the dieresis, the diphthong will be read as one sound.As readers and writers, we’re intimately familiar with the dots, strokes and dashes that punctuate the written word. We put the dieresis when we want to split a diphthong.
When a syllable has a diphthong (two vowels), the accent is put over the second vowel.Ī. When the first letter is capital and must be stressed, the accent is placed on the left side of the letter.ĭ. When a word is written in upper cases, it is not stressed.Įxample: ΦΑΡΜΑΚΕΙΟ (pharmacy), ΤΑΧΥΔΡΟΜΕΙΟ (post office).Ĭ. He told us (that) he would leave early.ī. Πως can also mean that and it is not stressed. πώς: when it means “how” or in a question.Įxample: Πώς σε λένε / What is your name? (literally, how do they call you?) Only words with more than one syllable are can take accent. It does not affect the pronunciation but it is used to denote that a syllable is stressed.