Punctuation is said to originate almost 5000 years after the invention of the written word, with the Mesha Stele in 840 BCE, a stone inscribed for King Mesha of Moab in present-day Jordan. The text of the stone features full stops or periods between each word and vertical strokes to mark the ends of sections.
Six hundred and forty years later, Aristophanes of Byzantium introduced a system of dots to indicate the amount of breath one would need to complete a given stretch of text when reading aloud, a mid-level dot marking a short passage or komma, a dot at the bottom marking a longer passage or kolon, and for very long pauses, a dot near the top of the line.
Skip ahead eight hundred years, to the 7th century CE, and the Spanish theologian, Isidore of Seville invents the comma, colon, and full stop, adapting Aristophanes’ pauses as grammatical markers. The modern system of punctuation was completed between 1400 and 1600 and has remained static since then: a technology not subject to impr…
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