Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [22]
If only we hadn’t started reading quietly to ourselves. Things were so simple at the start, before grammar came along and ruined things. 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 breathe 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 Institutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum, recommending “clear pausing in well-regulated delivery”. I do hope Harold Pinter knows about all this, by the way; who would have thought the pause had such a long and significant history?
Most of the marks used by those earnest scribes look bizarre to us now, of course: the positura, a mark like a number 7, which indicated the end of a piece of text; the sinister mark like the little gallows in a game of hangman that indicated the start of a paragraph (paragraphs weren’t indented until much later); and, significantly here, the virgula suspensiva, which looked like our present-day solidus or forward slash (/), and was used to mark the briefest pause or hesitation. Perhaps the key thing one needs to realise about the early history of punctuation is that, in a literary culture based entirely on the slavish copying of venerated texts, it would be highly presumptuous of a mere scribe to insert helpful marks where he thought they ought to go. Punctuation developed slowly and cautiously not because it wasn’t considered important, but, on the contrary, because it was such intensely powerful ju-ju. Pause in the wrong place and the sense of a religious text can alter in significant ways. For example, as Cecil Hartley pointed out in his 1818 Principles of Punctuation: or, The Art of Pointing, consider the difference between the following:
“Verily, I say unto thee, This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”
and:
“Verily I say unto thee this day, Thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”
Now, huge doctrinal differences hang on the placing of this comma. The first version, which is how Protestants interpret the passage (Luke, xxiii, 43), lightly skips over the whole unpleasant business of Purgatory and takes the crucified thief straight to heaven with Our Lord. The second promises Paradise at some later date (to be confirmed, as it were) and leaves Purgatory nicely in the picture for the Catholics, who believe in it. Similarly, it