The Development of the Description of Punctuation in Historical Grammar Books

The central thesis of this paper is that the evolution of punctuation reveals many interesting sociolinguistic aspects of a language. Studying punctuation can offer us new insights into the development of language codification, the relationship between speech and writing, the socio-cultural circumstances of a specific epoch, and it can even contribute to contemporary descriptions of orthographic prescription. On the history of the development of punctuation, several key titles have been written that take into consideration different text sources, periods and languages, e.g., [parkes1992], [salmon1999], and [mortara2008]. In this paper I aim to contrastively explore descriptions of punctuation found exclusively in a selection of prototypical and accessible grammar books from the time of Antiquity to the Enlightenment through the perspective of historical ‘comparative standardology’ [joseph1987], an approach that [deumert2003] claim has rarely been explored systematically. I have analysed five grammar books from Antiquity, forty from Renaissance Humanism (twenty-one Latin and nineteen vernacular), and twelve grammar books from the Enlightenment. The three analysed factors – the grammar-book function, the divergence of punctuation from grammatical teaching to orthographic content, and the transformation of punctuation into written characters – were recognized as the most significant legacies of grammar books in the evolution of punctuation and in its transformation into the function, status, and application as we know it today. Supported by the constant evolution of literacy, the number of punctuation marks has been steadily increasing. The observation of historical punctuation in de jure and de facto normative orthographies or grammar books shows the strong link between the socio-cultural context and punctuation-related descriptions or prescriptions.