PUNCTUATION.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 50, 13 December 1900, Page 15

PUNCTUATION.

The art of punctuation was developed gradually from very ancient times. Greek scribes before the Christian era used a wedge-shaped sign to mark a new paragraph. Later a pause in the sense was indicated by a blank space, a point, and sometimes by a slight oblique stroke or an apostrophe. In Latin manuscripts the full point appears first, and is variously plaoed on a level with the top, middle, or bottom of the letters. The invention of the modern system of punctuation has been attributed to Aristophanes, a grammarian of Alexandria. Jerome used signs (commata and cola) in his translation of the Scriptures ; while in early English and Irish manuscripts the comma is used, and the final stop is marked by one and sometimes two or more full points. With the advent of printing, punctuation was greatly improved and systematically adopted about the close of the fifteenth century, mainly owing to the Venetian printer Manutius. It is said that all the stops we now use appear in the ' Arcadia ' (1587) of Sir Philip Sydney.