Punctuation, Signs of

PUNCTUATION, SIGNS OF. - Already in the ancient grammarians there are hints of the punctuation of texts, but in the literary codices handed down to us from antiquity one finds only, derived from epigraphy, the sporadic use of dots as marks of distinction between word and word, or of other particular marks (paragraptus, stigma, asteriscus, etc.), of not well-defined value.

In the Middle Ages, starting from cursive scripts, punctuation follows a very elementary scheme, which distinguishes a long pause, a short one and an intermediate one by placing a dot in a different position with respect to the height of the letters (at the top, at the bottom, in the center). Subsequently, to avoid frequent confusions, a small line was also used, vertical or oblique, either alone or in various combinations with the dot. In the 9th century the long pause is marked by a dot plus a comma, placed side by side or beneath; in the 12th the intermediate pause is indicated by two dots side by side. The question mark already appears in some manuscripts of the end of the 8th century: it is however missing in many of the first half of the 9th. It should be borne in mind that until the beginning of the modern age punctuation is used very freely and follows rhythmic laws intended to regulate the inflection of the reader's voice rather than to distinguish the syntactic parts of the discourse.

Alessandro Pratesi