Punctuation Notes

Yesterday, I attended a lecture at Penn about the history of punctuation in early modern texts. Basically, the discussion was of how punctuation had two primary purposes and was developed in accordance with these. The first is syntactic and has come to be the predominant strain. The second tradition was punctuation in order to designate intensities in the text, especially with regards to how the reader modulate the voice. This second function of punctuation was almost like a kind of recording technology, so it doesn’t surprise me that it has become largely outmoded.

It did, however, have a major lasting effect on Spanish punctuation with the introduction of the inverted question and exclamation marks before words to signify how to read a given sentence at its start. This innovation was only developed in the mid 1700s, and it caught the eye of Ben Franklin. In a letter to Noah Webster, Franklin even suggested that English should adopt these kinds of marks. He explained that it’s a good thing to have the question mark in a sentence, “But this is absurdly Places at its End, so that the Reader does not discover it , ’till he finds he has wrongly modulated his Voice and is therefor obliged to begin again the Sentence.”

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In some minor personal news, I have a piece up currently at Pequin and new work in the print journal ‘The Benefactor’.

Tags: Benjamin Franklin, punctuation