Commas

The following text is largely drawn from Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves (pages 68-102):

• "More than any other mark, the comma draws our attention to the mixed origins of modern punctuation, and its consequent mingling of two quite distinct functions:

1.  To illustrate the grammar of a sentence

2.  To point up--rather in the manner of musical notation--such literary qualities as rhythm, direction, pitch, tone and flow" (70).

• This has been a problem four four hundred years.

• "The earliest known punctuation--credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium (librarian at Alexandria) around 200 BC--was a three-part system of dramatic notation (involving single points at different heights on the line) advising actors when to breath in preparation for a long bit, or a not-so-long bit, or a relatively short bit.  And that's all there was to it.  A comma, at that time, was the name of the relatively short bit (the word means in Greek 'a piece cut off'); and in fact when the word 'comma' was adopted into English in the 16th century, it still referred to a discrete, separable group of words rather than the friendly little tadpoley number-nine dot-with-a-tail that today we know and love.  For a millennium and a half, punctuation's purpose was to guide actors, chanters and readers-aloud through stretches of manuscript, indicating the pauses, accentuating matters of sense and sound, and leaving syntax mostly to look after itself.  St. Jerome, who translated the Bible in the 4th century, introduced a system of punctuation of religious texts per cola et commata ('by phrases'), to aid accurate pausing when reading aloud.  Cassiodorus, writing in the 6th century in southern Italy for the guidance of trainee scribes, included punctuation in his Instiutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum, recommending 'clear pausing in well-regulated delivery'" (72-73).

• With printing, the shift occurred rhetorical punctuation to one based on syntax: Aldus Manutius the Elder and the Younger "...ignored the old marks that had aided the reader-aloud. Books were now for reading and understanding, not intoning.  Moving your lips was becoming a no-no.  Within the seventy years it took for Aldus Manutius the Elder to be replaced by Aldus Manutius the Younger, things changed so drastically that in 1566 Aldus Manutius the Younger was able to state that the main object of punctuation was the clarification of syntax" (78).

Last updated: 14 Sept. 2008