English Metagraphic System throuhh History

Introduction
1. The metagrafic system as a means of written language
1.1. Punctuation as a branch of linguistics studying
1.1.1. Grammatology
1.1.2. Epigraphy and paleography
1.1.3. History of the study of writing
1.2. Punctuation as a means of text division and organization
1.2.1. The domain of punctuation
1.2.2. Indicators and characters
1.2.3. The status of punctuation rules
1.3. Historical Survey of the Punctuation System in different Languages
1.3.1. Differences in British English and American English
1.3.2. European languages
1.3.3. East Asian languages
1.3.4. Corean and Mongolian languages
1.3.5. Other scripts (The Sanskrit, Arabic, Ethiopian languages)
2. Evolution of the English Metagraphic System
2.1. Punctuation and Capitalization in Old English Manuscripts
2.2. Middle English period
2.3. Regularities and Functioning of Metagraphemes in Modern English
2.4. The Other Punctuation Marks
2.5. Priority Among Punctuation Marks
Conclusion
Bibliography

English Metagraphic System throuhh History

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2.2. Middle English period
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.
[The third temptation thatthe 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.
By the end of the 16th century writers of English were using most of the marks described by the younger Aldo in 1566; but their purpose was elocutionary, not syntactical. When George Puttenham, in his treatise The Arte of English Poesie(1589), and Simon Daines, in Orthoepia Anglicana (1640), specified a pause of one unit for a comma, of two units for a semicolon, and of three for a colon, they were no doubt trying to bring some sort of order into a basically confused and unsatisfactory situation. The punctuation of Elizabethan drama, of the devotional prose of John Donne or of Richard Hooker, and indeed of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678) was almost wholly elocutionary; and it lacked the inflectional element that had been the making of 12th-century punctuation.
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.
It was Ben Jonson, in his English Grammar, a work composed about 1617 and published posthumously in 1640, who first recommended syntactical punctuation in England. An early example is the 1625 edition of Francis Bacon's Essayes; and from the Restoration onward syntactical punctuation was in general use.
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.
Influential treatises on syntactical punctuation were published by Robert Monteith in 1704 and Joseph Robertson in 1795. Excessive punctuation was common in the 18th century: at its worst it used commas with every subordinate clause and separable phrase. Vestiges of this attitude are found in a handbook published in London as late as 1880.
It was the lexicographers Henry Watson Fowler and Francis George Fowler in The King's English, published in 1906, who established the current British practice of light punctuation. Punctuation in the United States has followed much the same path as in Britain, but the rules laid down by American authorities have in general been more rigid than the British rules.
The system of punctuation now used by writers of English has been complete since the 17th century. Three of its most important components are the space left blank between words; the indentation of the first line of a new paragraph; and the uppercase, or capital, letter written at the beginning of a sentence and at the beginning of a proper name or a title. The marks of punctuation, also known as points or stops, and the chief parts that they play in the system are as follows.
The end of a grammatically complete sentence is marked by a full point, full stop, or period. The period may also be used to mark abbreviations. The colon (:), which was once used like a full point and was followed by an uppercase letter, now serves mainly to indicate the beginning of a list, summary, or quotation. The semicolon (;) ranks halfway between a comma and a full point. It may be substituted for a period between two grammatically complete sentences that are closely connected in sense; in a long or complicated sentence, it may precede a coordinate conjunction (such as "or," "and," or "but"). A most usual means of indicating the syntactical turning points in a sentence, it is exposed to abuse. It may be used to separate the elements of a series, before a relative clause that does not limit or define its antecedent, in pairs to set off or isolate words or phrases, or in combination with coordinating conjunctions.
Other punctuation marks used in modern English include parentheses, which serve, like a pair of commas, to isolate a word or phrase; question, exclamation, and quotation marks; the hyphen; and the apostrophe.
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 (Robinson, 1992: 36–48).
Littera notabilior: an enlarged letter (often in a "display" script) which is used to mark the beginning of a new section (chapter, paragraph, sentence, stanza or line of verse, etc.); can also be used for any "capital" letters.
Punctus (. or •): the placement (which could be at the baseline, in the middle, or at the headline) was, according to a system elaborated by Isidore of Seville (Etymologies I.20), significant: in early punctuation systems, it was placed at the baseline to mark a pause in the middle of a sentence (roughly like our comma), in the middle for a longer pause between clauses (roughly like our semicolon), and at the headline for a long pause at the end of a sentence. With the development of minuscule scripts, however, such relative heights are hard to judge, and this set of distinctions is largely abandoned in the later Middle Ages, and . and • are more or less interchangeable (usually used for a final pause, to mark the end of a sentence). The punctus is the ancestor of our modern "period."
Punctus versus (which looks like a small "7" over a period; it can look like a modern semicolon): usually used for a final pause, to mark the end of a sentence (equivalent to a punctus).
Punctus elevatus (which looks like an inverted semicolon, with the tail going up and to the left): used from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, and usually used to indicate a major, medial pause (roughly equivalent to a modern comma or semicolon), usually where the sensus is complete though the sentence is not (as, for instance, between clauses of a sentence). It fell out of use in the fifteenth century, though it has obvious connections with the modern semicolon. The modern semicolon (Elizabethan "comma-colon" or "subdistinction") is a late sixteenth-century development.
Punctus flexus (which can look like a tilde or a small "u" over a period): a tenth-century invention, though it never came into common use; it was used to mark a minor medial pause where the sensus is not complete (equivalent, then, to a comma when separating phrases within a clause).
Punctus interrogativus (which sometimes looks like a tilde or just a squiggle above a period): used to indicate the end of a question (rising intonation). First appearing in the eighth century, it was not commonly used, since questions were easily recognized from their syntax. The modern form (?) and usage is a seventeenth-century invention.
Virgula suspensiva (/): in common use from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. Often used for short pauses (such as the caesura in the middle of a line of poetry), but sometimes was used as equivalent to the punctus. It could be made increasingly emphatic by doubling or even tripling. The virgule gradually dropped to the bottom of the line and curved, giving us the modern comma (the longer virgule was then redefined and used in a new manner). The comma as we know it is a sixteenth-century development (the first known use in England was in a book printed in 1521).
Colon (:): first appears in late fourteenth century, to mark either a full or a medial pause.
Hyphen (-): first appears in eleventh century (in England in late thirteenth century); its only common medieval use is to mark words broken at the ends of lines.
Parentheses or brackets: a fifteenth-century invention, to mark parenthetical material; they were curved in the opposite direction from modern parentheses, and were usually accompanied by the underlining of the words between the parentheses: )here are some medieval brackets(.
Underlining: is found in medieval manuscripts to mark quotations, direct speech, or parenthetical material; it is also commonly used to highlight proper names, and can be used as a form of expunction (to mark a word or words for deletion).
Exclamation mark: a modern invention, introduced in the seventeenth-century.
Apostrophe: the modern apostrophe is derived from a medieval mark of abbreviation, a suspension mark indicating that some letters are missing (and therefore we use the apostrophe to mark a contraction).
Quotation marks: an eighteenth-century invention. In medieval manuscripts, underlining was sometimes used to indicate direct speech or quotation, especially for Biblical quotations, but generally quotations were indicated by rhetorical rather than graphic means.
Dash: an eighteenth-century invention.
Capitulum: the Latin "capitulum" means "head," and it gives us the Modern English word "chapter" (the beginning or head of a new section of the work). The chapter marker, a "C" with a vertical stroke, comes to be used not only to mark chapter divisions, but also paragraph divisions (equivalent to the paragraphus, "¶") and sometimes even sentence divisions (which is related to our modern practice of "capitalizing" the beginning of a sentence).
Paragraphus (a "gallows-pole" or upper-case gamma, or § later ¶): used to mark paragraph divisions.
Insertion signals: material missed was added between the lines or in the margin, with the point of insertion marked with a caret (common from the twelfth century on) or, sometimes, various "nota bene" signs, etc. The word "caret" means "it is lacking."
Omission signals: there are several common ways of indicating that a word or phrase was to be deleted: cancellation (crossing out), expunction (dots placed below the words or passage to be deleted), vacation (enclosing passage between the syllables "va" and "cat"; "vacat" = "it is void, empty").
It was the lexicographers Henry Watson Fowler and Francis George Fowler in The King's English, published in 1906, who established the current British practice of light punctuation. Punctuation in the United States has followed much the same path as in Britain, but the rules laid down by American authorities have in general been more rigid than the British rules.
The system of punctuation now used by writers of English has been complete since the 17th century. Three of its most important components are the space left blank between words; the indentation of the first line of a new paragraph; and the uppercase, or capital, letter written at the beginning of a sentence and at the beginning of a proper name or a title. The marks of punctuation, also known as points or stops, and the chief parts that they play in the system are as follows.
The end of a grammatically complete sentence is marked by a full point, full stop, or period. The period may also be used to mark abbreviations. The colon (:), which was once used like a full point and was followed by an uppercase letter, now serves mainly to indicate the beginning of a list, summary, or quotation. The semicolon (;) ranks halfway between a comma and a full point. It may be substituted for a period between two grammatically complete sentences that are closely connected in sense; in a long or complicated sentence, it may precede a coordinate conjunction (such as "or," "and," or "but"). A most usual means of indicating the syntactical turning points in a sentence, it is exposed to abuse. It may be used to separate the elements of a series, before a relative clause that does not limit or define its antecedent, in pairs to set off or isolate words or phrases, or in combination with coordinating conjunctions (Salmon, 1962: 348–353).
Other punctuation marks used in modern English include parentheses, which serve, like a pair of commas, to isolate a word or phrase; question, exclamation, and quotation marks; the hyphen; and the apostrophe.
2.3. Regularities and Functioning of Metagraphemes in Modern English
Punctuation is placed in text to make meaning clear and to make reading easier. The various punctuation marks perform four functions: they
(1) separate (a period separates sentences),
(2) group or enclose (parentheses enclose extraneous information),
(3) connect (a hyphen connects a unit modifier),
(4) impart meaning (a question mark may make an otherwise declarative sentence interrogative).
The function of a punctuation mark is the basis for the rules governing its use and should be the basis for determining whether or not it is needed. The modern tendency is to punctuate to prevent misreading (open style) rather than to use all punctuation that the grammatical structure will allow (close style). Although the open style results in a more inviting product, it does allow subjectivity, perhaps arbitrariness, in the use of some marks, for example, the comma and hyphen.
I. The Full Stop (Period) (.)
1. The full stop or period indicates the close of a complete narrative and an imperative (expressed with no exclamation) sentence:
The sun rose.
The goods were shipped yesterday.
Daylight sparkled on the land, on the beach and over the sea.
Collect everything you will be in need of and get ready to leave this place.
Please, give me that book.
2. The full stop is used after most abbreviations consisting of single letters:
i. e. (for the Latin id est – that is),
e. g. (exampli gratia – for example),
a. m. (ante meridiem),
p. m.(post meridiem),
p. m. h. (production per man-hour);
P. S.(post scriptum),
c. o. (c/o, care of).
3. However, abbreviations on the model of U.N.E.S.C.O. (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization) may become new words spelt with capital letters, thus: UNESCO. Also abbreviation R.D.A.R. (radar – Radio Detection And Ranging) –, is a new word spelt with a small letter (radar)
4. It is normal with abbreviations on the model of adj. (for adjective) and Dept. (for Department).
5. The full stop is optional if the last letter of the abbreviation is also the last letter of the word, as in Dr. (for Doctor), Mr. (Mister).
6. The full stop is also used after initial letters:
A.C.L.S. (American Council of Learned Societies),
B.O.C. (British Olympic Assoсiation),
J. C. Marin (John Chery MARIN, 1870–1953).
II. The comma (,)
The comma is a punctuation mark used to indicate a slight separation of sentence elements. They are used to set off non-restrictive or parenthetical elements, quotations, items in series, etc. In other words the comma denotes intonation segmentations, separates out some syntactical groups in sentence or in an utterance, and represents the shortest pause.
(A) In a Simple Sentence
1. The comma is used between two or more words of the same part of speech:
A dull, heavy sound was heard.
It was a wide, rough road.
There are many theatres, museums, and libraries in the city.
Note (a). When and joins two single words, as a rule no comma is used:
In front of them stretched the sea, blue and calm.
The water babbled and tapped along the seaweed on the low rocks that lay afar out.
Note (b). When several words are joined by means of and, a comma is placed before this conjunction:
Trees, and bridges, and houses were swept down by the flooded stream.
Note (c). But when the different words are intended to be combined quickly so as to prеsent to the mind only one picture, they are spoken without a pause, and no comma is used:
Whirling and boiling and roaring like thunder, the stream came down upon them.
Note (d). When and occurs only between the two last words of the series, the comma is usually inserted before this conjunction; although many writers omit this comma:
The blast smelt of icebergs, arctic seas, whales, and white bears, carrying the snow so that it licked the land but did not deepen on it.
It was a February morning, dry, cold and starry.
Note (e). If two attributes expressed by adjectives are not homogeneous, no comma is inserted between them:
A young girl with cheeks like poppies and eyes like jet, with a short red dress and bushy black-brown hair, comes out, and stands in the doorway.
The next day came the little red bull, drawing the cart to the office door.
2. When words of the same class go together in pairs, each pair is separated by a comma:
Old and young, men and women, Negro and white were drawn into participation in the Inauguration Day celebration.
3. When two parts of a sentence have some words in common which are not expressed for each of them, the second part is marked off by commas:
His classification is different from, and more comprehensive than, any other which we have met.
4. Words and expressions in apposition are set off from the rest of the sentence by commas:
Pushkin, the great Russian poet, was born in 1799.
It was Birker, the head of the works council, the leader of the strike committee, a clear-headed and courageous man, ready to lend a hand fearlessly.
At last we were in truth in the High Pamir, the famous Roof of the World.
In the east, mountain peaks, fingers of snow, glittered above the mist.
Note. – If the apposition (a noun phrase) is closely connected with the word (antecedent) it explains, nо comma is used:
Peter the Great; the Cathedral of Christ the Savor; William the Conqueror invaded Britain. Also when the appositive precedes the noun it qualifies: