History of English punctuation

The earliest writing had no capitalization, no spaces, and no punctuation marks. So long as it was restricted to a limited range of topics (initially, recording business transactions), this worked. Expanding the use of writing to more abstract concepts required some way to disambiguate meanings. Until the eighteenth century, punctuation was principally an aid to reading aloud; after that time its development was as a mechanism for ensuring that the text made sense when read silently.[1]

The oldest document that uses punctuation is the Mesha Stele (9th century BC) with points between the words and horizontal strokes between the sense section.

The Greeks (circa 5th century BC) were using punctuation marks consisting of vertically arranged dots, usually two (c.f. the modern colon) or three. Greek playwrights (e.g. Euripides and Aristophanes) used symbols to distinguish the ends of phrases in written drama: essentially helping the play's cast to know when to pause. In particular, they used three different symbols to divide speeches into three lengths, known as commas (indicated by a centred dot), colons (indicated by a dot on the base line), and periods (indicated by a raised dot).

The Romans (circa 1st century BC) also adopted symbols to indicate pauses.

Punctuation developed dramatically when large numbers of copies of the Christian Bible started to be produced. These were designed to be read aloud and the copyists began to introduce a range of marks to aid the reader, including indentation, various punctuation marks, and an early version of initial capitals. St Jerome and his colleagues, who produced the Vulgate translation of the Bible into Latin, developed an early system (circa 400 AD); this was considerably improved on by Alcuin. The marks included the virgule (forward slash) and a dots in different locations: centred in the line, raised, or in groups.

The use of punctuation was not standardized until after the invention of printing. Credit for introducing a standard system is generally given to Aldus Manutius and his grandson. They popularized the practice of ending sentences with the colon or full stop, invented the semicolon, made occasional use of parentheses, and created the modern comma by lowering the virgule.[2]

The modern system of English punctuation was pretty well in place by 1660, with the full stop, comma, semicolon, colon, dash, apostrophe, exclamation mark, quotation marks and parentheses all in use