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Making a Point
The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation
By David Crystal St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2015 David Crystal
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6564-8
CHAPTER 1
In the beginning ...
Up on the second floor in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, in a gallery displaying artefacts from early England, there is a beautiful teardrop-shaped object. A decorated golden frame surrounds a colourful enamelled design protected by a flat panel of polished rock crystal. It shows the picture of a man dressed in a green tunic, and holding a flowered sceptre in each hand, his wide eyes gazing intently at something we do not see. And around the rim of the object, just a few millimetres thick, is an Old English inscription in Roman letters:
AELFREDMECHEHTGEWYRCAN
There are no spaces between the words. Inserting these, we get
AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN
Alfred me ordered to make
= Alfred ordered me to be made
This is King Alfred the Great, and the object has come to be called the Alfred Jewel.
It was found near Athelney Abbey in Somerset in 1693, the place where Alfred launched his successful counter-attack against the Danes in 878. There has been much debate about the identity of the man, and what the purpose of the jewel was. An important clue is the base of the object, which is in the form of a dragon-like head with a cylindrical socket in its mouth. What did that socket hold? Probably a pointer, used to help a reader to follow the lines of text in a manuscript, which would often be placed on a stand some distance away from the reader. It's now thought the large-eyed figure represents the sense of sight. His eyes are wide open and focused because he is reading.
For people interested in English punctuation, the jewel inscription provides an important opening insight. There isn't any. This is a sentence, but there's no full stop. All the letters are the same, capitals, so there's no contrast showing where the sentence begins or that Alfred is a name. And the inscription lacks what to modern eyes is the most basic orthographic device to aid reading: spaces to separate the words.
Sixty miles away, in another museum, there's another remarkable object from Anglo-Saxon times: the Franks Casket. This is an intricately carved whalebone box that was presented to the British Museum by one of its curators, Augustus Franks, in 1867. Each side of the box displays scenes from Roman, Jewish, Christian, and Germanic traditions, accompanied by an explanatory inscription in English and Latin. The English words are written in runes, and if I transcribe a few in their Roman letter equivalents, they would look like this:
HERFEGTAP+TITUSENDGIUPEASU
Once again, there are no word-spaces. Inserting them, we get
HER FEGTAÞ +TITUS END GIUÞEASU
Here fight Titus and Jews
It is a description of the capture of Jerusalem by Emperor Titus in AD 70. (The letter Þ represents a 'th' sound.)
This state of affairs is common in the inscriptions of the period. Many have no spacing or punctuation marks at all. Today, word-spaces are such an obvious and universal feature of the written language that we can easily forget they are there, and ignore their role as a device of punctuation. But a word-space is just as much a punctuation feature as is its close relative, the hyphen. And one of the topics I'll discuss later in this book will be the uncertain trading-relationship between spaces and hyphens. Should a word be written spaced, hyphenated, or solid? Is it flower pot, flower-pot, or flowerpot?
Word-spaces are the norm today; but it wasn't always so. It's not difficult to see why. We don't actually need them to understand language. We don't use them when we speak, and fluent readers don't put pauses between words as they read aloud. Read this paragraph out loud, and you'll probably pause at the commas and full stops, but you won't pause between the words. They run together. So, if we think of writing purely as a way of putting speech down on paper, there's no reason to think of separating the words by spaces. And that seems to be how early writers thought, for unspaced text (often called, in Latin, scriptura continua) came to be a major feature of early Western writing, in both Greek and Latin. From the first century AD we find most texts throughout the Roman Empire without words being separated at all. It was thus only natural for missionaries to introduce unspaced writing when they arrived in England.
Writing in antiquity was viewed by most people as a guide to reading aloud. Today, we tend to read silently, privately, rapidly. We can skim through text if we wish, omitting portions. In early Greek and Roman civilization, people routinely read aloud to audiences in displays of oratory, every syllable was valued, and eloquence was highly rated. No skimming then. A text would have been well prepared before being read in public, so that it became more like a musical score, reminding the reader what to say next. In such circumstances, experienced readers wouldn't need word-spaces or other marks. Some influential writers, indeed, poured scorn on punctuation. Cicero, for example, thought that the rhythm of a well-written sentence was enough to tell someone how to bring it to an effective close. Punctuation marks were unnecessary.
But without punctuation of any kind, readers would have to do their homework to avoid unexpected miscues. We would have to do our homework too, if we had no word-spacing today. Faced with the sentence
therapistsneedspecialtreatment
we need to know if this is a text about sex crimes or about speech pathology before we can correctly read it aloud. Early writers on oratory and rhetoric, such as Aristotle and Quintilian, often illustrated the dangers of misreading an unpunctuated text, and stressed the need for good preparation. Familiarity, they hoped, would breed content.
We can carry out an experiment to show how familiarity with a text helps our reading of it, even if it is unspaced. Take a text you know well, and write it down without word-spaces, then try reading it aloud. Like this:
tobeornottobethatisthequestion
ourfatherwhoartinheavenhallowedbethyname
jackandjillwentupthehilltofetchapailofwater
Our knowledge of the content enables us to read it quickly. But with a bit more effort we can do this even if we don't know the text in advance. In fact, this is something we're increasingly doing these days, as a result of the Internet. Domain names don't use word-spaces. Consider the following addresses:
www.davidcrystal.com
www.iloveshakespeare.com
www.thisisanexampleofapossiblelongdomainname.com
It may take us a millisecond or two longer to read these strings, but we can do it. Scriptura continua is back!
In Anglo-Saxon times in England, inscriptions typically don't show any sign of punctuation. But not all. What is thought to be the very earliest sentence inscribed in English in fact does show word division. This is the Undley bracteate, a tiny gold medallion found at Undley in Suffolk in 1982, and dated to the second half of the fifth century AD. It consists of three words in runic letters, and the words are separated by small circles:
gægogæ º mæga º medu
The meaning is uncertain – one version translates the Old English as 'this she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman' – but the way the runemaster worked is clear enough. This man wanted his words separated. Punctuation practices evidently varied from the very beginning.
Interlude: Silent reading
In antiquity, to encounter someone reading silently was sufficiently unusual that it could elicit a comment. In Book 6 (Chapter 3) of his Confessions, St Augustine recalls how as a young man he wanted to ask questions of his mentor, St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, but felt unable to do so when he visited him because of the way Ambrose was reading:
When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart explored the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still ... when we came to see him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud. We would sit there quietly, for no one had the heart to disturb him ...
Augustine puzzles over why Ambrose was doing this – not even using the muffled voice that someone would typically use when alone:
Perhaps he was afraid that, if he read aloud, some obscure passage in the author he was reading might raise a question in the mind of an attentive listener, and he would have to explain the meaning or even discuss some of the more difficult points. If he spent time in this way, he would not manage to read as much as he wished. Perhaps a more likely reason why he read to himself was that he needed to spare his voice, which quite easily became hoarse. But whatever his reason, we may be sure it was a good one.
Translation by R S Pine-Coffin from Saint Augustine: Confessions (Penguin Classics, 1961).
CHAPTER 2
... was diversity
Diverse punctuation practice is inevitable when there are several ways of marking the same thing. Inserting spaces is one way of separating words, but there are others. Here's a selection:
thisisnotanexampleofwordseparation
this is an example of word separation
this.is.an.example.of.word.separation
this+is+an+example+of+word+separation
thiSiSaNexamplEoFworDseparatioN
ThisIsAnExampleOfWordSeparation
this-is-an-example-of-word-separation
The last two are ways around the domain-name problem mentioned at the end of the previous chapter. If we can't use spaces to make it easier to read the words in an Internet address, then we can use hyphens or the curiously but aptly named 'camel case' (as in the two examples showing a mix of upper-case and lower-case letters).
In Anglo-Saxon times, we see a similar diversity, reflecting an earlier variability that was present among the writers of ancient Rome. People experimented with word division. Some inscriptions have the words separated by a circle (as with the Undley bracteate) or a raised dot. Some use small crosses. Gradually we see spaces coming in, but often in a very irregular way, with some words spaced and others not – what is sometimes called an 'aerated' script. Even in the eleventh century, less than half the inscriptions in England had all the words separated.
The slow arrival of word division in inscriptions isn't so surprising when we consider their character. The texts that identify jewels, boxes, statues, buildings, swords, and so on are typically short and often predictable. If people know their church is called 'St Ambrose', then they will read its name (if they are able to read) regardless of how it is spaced. Nobody would interpret STAMBROSE as STAM + BROSE. Also, the physical environment makes punctuation unnecessary. If the aim of a full stop is to tell readers that a sentence has come to an end, then the boundary of a physical object will do that just as well. It's no different today. We don't need a full stop at the end of a sign saying WAY OUT. The right-hand edge of the sign is enough to show us that the message is finished.
If they are able to read ... In Anglo-Saxon times, most people couldn't. Only a tiny elite of monks, scribes, and other professionals knew how to write; so there was no popular expectation that inscriptions should be easy to read. Nor was there any peer-group pressure among inscribers. In a monastery, there would be a scribal tradition to be followed and a strict hierarchy, with junior scribes copying the manuscript practices of their seniors. By contrast, the sculptor or goldsmith producing an inscription would be someone working alone, with no guidance other than his own sense of tradition and aesthetic taste. Divergent punctuation practices were an inevitable result.
We see a similar diversity when we read the earliest surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts – the meagre collection of glossaries, charters, wills, name-lists, poems, riddles, and religious texts from the seventh and eighth centuries that give us our first real sense of what Old English was like. Manuscripts, of course, are very different from inscriptions, as they contain sentences of varying complexity extending over several pages. They can also be revised and corrected, either by the original scribe or by later readers. But these early texts have one thing in common: unlike the inscriptions, they all display word-spaces.
By the seventh century in England, word-spacing had become standard practice, reflecting a radical change that had taken place in reading habits. Silent reading was now the norm. Written texts were being seen not as aids to reading aloud, but as self-contained entities, to be used as a separate source of information and reflection from whatever could be gained from listening and speaking. It is the beginning of a view of language, widely recognized today, in which writing and speech are seen as distinct mediums of expression, with different communicative aims and using different processes of composition. And this view is apparent in the efforts scribes made to make the task of reading easier, with the role of spacing and other methods of punctuation becoming increasingly appreciated.
In some cases, the nature of the genre made word-spacing inevitable. The earliest English manuscripts are alphabetical glossaries containing lists of Latin words with their English equivalents – essential aids for the many monks who were having to learn Latin as a foreign language. But imagine a glossary with no word-spaces! The different entries would run into each other and the whole thing would become unusable. Bilingual glossaries – as modern bilingual dictionaries – need good layout for readers to find their way about.
Word-spaces are inevitable, also, when glossing a continuous text. There's a copy of the Book of Psalms dating from around 825, known as the Vespasian Psalter. It's in Latin, with the words spaced, but someone has added word-by-word English translations – over 30,000 of them – above the Latin words in the space between the lines. Each gloss is easily visible, at a distance from its neighbours. Once again, the layout dictates the spacing.
What happens in genres where the text is a series of sentences, rather than a series of isolated words? Here too we see word-spacing, but the situation is more complex. Very often, some spaces are larger than others, probably reflecting a scribe's sense of the way words relate in meaning to each other. A major sense-break might have a larger space. Words that belong closely together might have a small one. It's difficult to show this in modern print, where word-spaces tend to be the same width, but scribes often seemed to think like this:
we bought a cup of tea in the cafe
The 'little' words, such as prepositions, pronouns, and the definite article, are felt to 'belong' to the following content words. Indeed, so close is this sense of binding that many scribes echo earlier practice and show them with no separation at all. Here's a transcription of two lines from one of Ælfric's sermons, dated around 990.
þærwæronðagesewene twegenenglas onhwitumgyrelu;
þær wæron ða gesewene twegen englas on hwitum gyrelu;
'there were then seen two angels in white garments'
Eacswilc onhisacennednysse wæronenglasgesewene'.
Eacswilc on his acennednysse wæron englas gesewene'.
'similarly at his birth were angels seen'
The word-strings, separated by spaces, reflect the grammatical structure and units of sense within the sentence. And a careful examination of the original text shows an even more subtle feature. Normally the letter e is written much as we do today, as in the first two e' s in acennednysse; but when the e appears before the space, its middle stroke is elongated, acting as a bridge between the two word-strings. It's an early kind of letter-joining, or ligature.
The Ælfric sermon is quite late, for an Anglo-Saxon text, but its use of word-strings and variable word-spaces is typical of the time, and the practice continues until the very end of the Old English period. The extract also shows the presence of other forms of punctuation (which I'll discuss in the next chapter). Taken together, even in just two lines of text it's possible to sense that there has been a major change in orthographic behaviour compared with the unspaced, punctuationless writing seen in the English inscriptions and in traditional Latin.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Making a Point by David Crystal. Copyright © 2015 David Crystal. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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