History of punctuation marks in Russian. The history of the emergence of punctuation marks in the Russian language and their modern use in comparison with European punctuation

Ecology of knowledge. Where, when and why did modern punctuation marks appear? What kind of punctuation did you use? Ancient Greece, Rome and the Middle Ages.

Where, when and why did modern punctuation marks appear? Blogger Kate Houston on the pages of BBC Culture traces the history of periods, commas and exclamation points - from the Library of Alexandria to the appearance of emoji.

The first punctuation marks appeared in the 3rd century BC, and they were proposed by the manager of the famous Alexandrian Library, the ancient Greek philologist Aristophanes. Before that, not only commas or dashes, but also capital letters or even spaces were neglected in texts: well-prepared and convincing speech was much more appreciated in ancient Greece and Rome. Fluent sight reading, even on mother tongue then it looked incredible. Words and sentences that were not delimited by anything merged into a mess, and the reader, unfamiliar with the text, inevitably stopped and stammered.

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Aristophanes proposed the use of three kinds of characters: the dot in the middle of a line ( ), below (.) and above ( ), which he called them comma ("comma"), colon ("colon") and period ("periodos"). True, in fact, these were rather not punctuation marks, but comments on the texts - they prompted readers how long the pause should be left between words and sentences.

The Romans were not impressed by the innovation of Aristophanes, and therefore, with the beginning of their dominance in the Mediterranean, the forerunners of modern punctuation marks again disappeared from the manuscripts. Cicero, one of the most famous Roman orators, even said that the end of a sentence should not be determined by a pause taken by the speaker, or by any symbol set by the scribe, but only by "the demands of rhythm." Later, the Romans experimented a little more with the delimitation of words by dots, but also without much enthusiasm - in the second century AD, they were canceled. Cult public speaking was too strong and the speeches delivered there were not read from paper, but were memorized by the speakers.

Punctuation marks returned to books only with the advent of Christian culture in the 4th-5th centuries of our era: if the pagans could transmit their traditions orally, then for the Christian culture the books became central part her identity. The Psalter, the four Gospels - the word of God went around the world and was actively decorated with decorative letters, intricate engravings and, of course, various signs.

Christian authors began to use punctuation marks around the 6th century to place accents in texts that helped avoid ambiguities and misunderstandings among readers. Even later, already in the 7th century, Isidore of Seville, later canonized catholic church, returns to the system of Aristophanes. At the same time, he endows the old signs with new additional meanings. The lower dot (.) now denotes not only a pause between words, but also gets the grammatical functions of the first ever comma, while the upper dot (·) marks the end of a sentence.

Shortly thereafter, in the 8th century, spaces between words also appear. They are introduced by Irish and Scottish monks, tired of isolating individual words from an endless string of unfamiliar Latin letters.

Since then, the system of points proposed by Aristophanes has become medieval Europe generally recognized and gradually develops. The new signs come from music notation inspired by Gregorian chants. These are punctus versus, which suspends the sentence (a harbinger of the modern semicolon), punctus elevatus, which indicates changes in tone (in writing it looked like an inverted semicolon, and eventually developed into a modern colon), and punctus interrogatives, used to highlight exclamatory and interrogative proposals (modern exclamation mark appeared only in the 15th century).

As a result, the Aristophanean points began to gradually degenerate. With the advent of more specific signs, the distinctions between them became so subtle that the authors got bored with these small, medium and long pauses. Now the point could be placed anywhere in the text, and it meant something between a modern comma, a semicolon and, accordingly, a point.

Absolutely new system punctuation in the 12th century was proposed by the Italian writer Boncompagno da Signa. It had only two characters: a slash (/) to indicate pauses and a dash (-) to complete a sentence. And if the fate of the latter is vague - not the fact that it was he who became the ancestor of the modern dash, then the slash immediately became incredibly popular. Compact and well-marked, it was much better than Aristophanes' commas for marking pauses.

The punctuation system finally took shape with the release of the first printed Bible: in it, the slash Boncompagno da Signa fell down, acquired a tail and became a modern comma, a colon similar to them and a question mark joined the medieval semicolon and exclamation mark, and the ancient Greek period finally found its rightful place at the end of a sentence. For writers, this set was quite sufficient, and the printing process fixed it as the standard for many centuries to come.

And only now, when the main way of transmitting information was no longer newspapers with books, but the Internet, the punctuation system came to life again - with commas and periods scattered across the keyboard, an abstract writer of the 15th century could still cope, but what to do with emoji and emoticons? published

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Percent "%"

The word "percentage" itself comes from the Latin. "pro centum", which means "hundredth part" in translation. In 1685, Mathieu de la Porte's Manual of Commercial Arithmetic was published in Paris. In one place, it was about percentages, which then meant "cto" (short for cento). However, the typesetter mistook that "cto" for a fraction and typed "%". So because of a typo, this sign came into use.

The authorship of the ampersand is attributed to Marcus Tullius Tiron, a devoted slave and secretary of Cicero. Even after Tyro became a freedman, he continued to write Ciceron's texts. And by 63 BC. e. invented his own system of abbreviations for speeding up writing, called “Tyron signs” or “Tyron notes” (Notæ Tironianæ, no originals survived), which were used until the 11th century (so at the same time Tiron is also considered the founder of Roman shorthand).

Question mark "?"

It has been found in printed books since the 16th century, however, to express the question, it was fixed much later, only in the 18th century.

The mark of the sign comes from the Latin letters q and o (quaestio - search [answer]). Initially, they wrote q over o, which then transformed into a modern style.

Exclamation mark "!"

The exclamation mark comes from the expression "note of admiration" (a mark of amazement). According to one theory of its origin, it was the Latin word for joy (Io), written with an "I" above the "o". The exclamation mark first appeared in the Catechism of Edward VI, printed in London in 1553.

Doggy, or commercial floor "@"

The origin of this symbol is unknown. The traditional hypothesis is a medieval abbreviation of the Latin preposition ad (meaning "to", "on", "to", "y", "at").

In 2000, Giorgio Stabile, a Sapienza professor, put forward a different hypothesis. A letter written by a Florentine merchant in 1536 mentioned the price of one "A" of wine, with the "A" adorned with a curl and looking like the "@" according to Stabila, short for the unit of measure of volume, the standard amphora.

in spanish, portuguese, French the @ symbol traditionally means arroba - an old Spanish measure of weight equal to 11.502 kg (in Aragon 12.5 kg); the word itself comes from the Arabic "ar-rub", which means "a quarter" (a quarter of a hundred pounds). In 2009, the Spanish historian Jorge Romance discovered the abbreviation of arroba with the @ symbol in an Aragonese manuscript of the Taula de Ariza written in 1448, almost a century before the Florentine script studied by Stabile.

Signs similar to @ are found in Russian books of the 16th-17th centuries - in particular, on the title page of the Sudebnik of Ivan the Terrible (1550). Usually this is the letter “az” decorated with a curl, denoting a unit in the Cyrillic number system, in the case of Sudebnik, the first point.

Octothorpe or sharp "#"

The etymology and English spelling (octothorp, octothorpe, octatherp) of the word is debatable.

According to some sources, the sign comes from a medieval cartographic tradition, where a village surrounded by eight fields was designated in this way (hence the name "octothorp").

According to other reports, this is a playful neologism of Bell Labs employee Don Macpherson (eng. Don Macpherson), which appeared in the early 1960s, from octo- (Latin octo, Russian eight), talking about the eight "ends" of the character, and - thorpe referring to Jim Thorpe (medalist Olympic Games, which McPherson was interested in). However, Douglas A. Kerr, in his article "The ASCII Character 'Octatherp'", says that "octatherp" was created as a joke by himself, as well as by Bell Labs engineers John Schaak and Herbert Uthlaut. The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories (1991) gives the spelling "octotherp" as original, and credits telephone engineers as its authors.

Semicolon ";"

The semicolon was first introduced by the Italian printer Aldo Manutius (Italian: Aldo Pio Manuzio; 1449/1450-1515), who used it to separate opposite words and independent parts of compound sentences. Shakespeare already used the semicolon in his sonnets. In Russian texts, the comma and the semicolon appeared at the end of the 15th century.

Asterisk, or asterisk "*"

It was introduced in the 2nd century BC. e. in the texts of the Library of Alexandria by the ancient philologist Aristophanes of Byzantium to indicate ambiguities.

Parentheses "()"

Parentheses appeared in 1556 with Tartaglia (for a radical expression) and later with Girard. At the same time, Bombelli used a corner in the form of the letter L as an initial bracket, and an inverted one as an end bracket (1550); this record became the progenitor square brackets. Curly braces were suggested by Viet (1593). Nevertheless, most mathematicians then preferred to underline the highlighted expression instead of brackets. Leibniz introduced brackets into general use.

Tilde "~"

In most languages, the superscript tilde corresponds to a character derived from the letters n and m, which in medieval cursive were often written above the line (above the previous letter) and degenerated into a wavy li
niyu.

Dot "."

The oldest sign is dot. It is already found in the monuments of ancient Russian writing. However, its use in that period differed from the modern one: firstly, it was not regulated; secondly, the dot was placed not at the bottom of the line, but above - in the middle of it; moreover, in that period, even individual words were not separated from each other. For example: at that time. a holiday is approaching ... (Arkhangelsk Gospel, XI century). What is the explanation for the word dot gives V. I. Dahl:

“POINT (poke) f., badge from an injection, from sticking to something with a point, tip of a pen, pencil; small speck."

The dot can rightly be considered the ancestor of Russian punctuation. It is no coincidence that this word (or its root) entered the name of such signs as semicolon, colon, ellipsis. And in the Russian language of the 16th-18th centuries, the question mark was called question mark, exclamatory - surprise point. In the grammatical writings of the 16th century, the doctrine of punctuation marks was called “the doctrine of the power of points” or “about the point mind”, and in the grammar of Lawrence Zizanias (1596) the corresponding section was called “On points”.

Comma ","

The most common punctuation mark in Russian is considered comma. This word is found in the 15th century. According to P. Ya. Chernykh, the word comma- this is the result of substantiation (transition into a noun) of the passive participle of the past tense from the verb commas (sya) — "to hook (sya)", "to hurt", "to stab". V. I. Dal connects this word with the verbs wrist, comma, stammer - “stop”, “delay”. This explanation, in our opinion, seems reasonable.

Colon ":"

Colon[:] as a separating sign begins to be used from the end of the 16th century. It is mentioned in the grammars of Lavrenty Zizaniy, Melety Smotrytsky (1619), as well as in the first Russian grammar of the Dolomonos period by V. E. Adodurov (1731).

The later characters are dash[-] And ellipsis[…]. There is an opinion that the dash was invented by N.M. Karamzin. However, it has been proven that this sign was found in the Russian press already in the 60s of the 18th century, and N. M. Karamzin only contributed to the popularization and consolidation of the functions of this sign. For the first time, the dash sign [-] under the name "silent woman" was described in 1797 in the "Russian Grammar" by A. A. Barsov.

Ellipsis sign[…] under the name “stop sign” is noted in 1831 in the grammar of A. Kh. Vostokov, although its use occurs in the practice of writing much earlier.

No less interesting is the history of the appearance of the sign, which later received the name quotes[" "]. The word quotation marks in the meaning of a musical (hook) sign occurs in the 16th century, but in the meaning punctuation mark it was only used in late XVIII century. It is assumed that the initiative to introduce this punctuation mark into the practice of Russian written speech (as well as dash) belongs to N. M. Karamzin. Scientists believe that the origin of this word is not fully understood. Comparison with the Ukrainian name paws makes it possible to assume that it is formed from the verb kavykat - "to hobble", "to limp". In Russian dialects kavysh - "duckling", "gosling"; kavka - "frog". In this way, quotes — „traces of duck or frog legs”, “hook”, “squiggle”.

As you can see, the names of most punctuation marks in Russian are native Russian, and the term punctuation marks itself goes back to the verb punctuate - "to stop," to delay in motion. The names of only two signs were borrowed. Hyphen(dash) - from it. Divis(from lat. division— separately) and dash (trait) - from French tiret, tirer.

Start scientific study punctuation was set by M. V. Lomonosov in the Russian Grammar. Today we use the "Rules of Spelling and Punctuation", adopted in 1956, that is, almost half a century ago.

"$" sign
There are many versions of the origin of the dollar, I want to tell you about the most interesting ones.

In one of the first, this symbol is directly related to the letter S. In the era of their colonization, the Spaniards put the letter S on gold bars and sent them from the American continent to Spain. Upon arrival, they were applied a vertical strip, and upon sending back, another one.

According to another version, the sign S is two pillars of Hercules, which are wrapped in a ribbon, that is, the Spanish coat of arms, symbolizing power and authority, as well as financial stability and steadfastness. The story goes that Hercules erected two rocks on the shores of the Strait of Gibraltar, in honor of his exploits. But the waves washing the rocks represent the letter S.

Another story says that the sign came from the abbreviation US-United States. But, in my opinion, the most interesting and more common is the story about the origin of writing the monetary unit of the peso. During the Middle Ages in Europe, the most common currency was the Spanish Real. They entered the circulation of England, and were referred to as "peso". In the documents, “peso” was shortened to capital letters P and S. And then to everything, people did not want to spend a lot of time writing letters and replaced the letter P, and only the wand remained, and the symbol was $.

On and from all sorts of interesting usefulness there

Everyone is well aware of such a punctuation mark as a colon. In Russian, it indicates that after it a part of the text or sentence is connected by semantic explanatory relations with that part of the sentence or text that comes before the colon.

This punctuation mark is introduced at school. Almost all of us deal with colon after high school throughout our lives. At the same time, few of us are familiar with the history of the origin of this punctuation mark.

At one time, Plato, the philosopher of ancient Greece, ended some sections of his books with a colon. In many languages, such a punctuation mark is placed immediately after the word, and after the colon itself - a space. But there are also languages ​​in which this sign is separated by a narrow space from the word after which it stands. This can be observed, for example, in written French.

The semicolon is considered the equivalent of this punctuation mark in Church Slavonic writing. In those days, the colon could also be used in the function of a dot and even an ellipsis. At the end of abbreviations in Russian, this punctuation mark was found until the middle of the 19th century.

As an abbreviation sign, the colon can often be found in old European writing. The colon retained this function in some modern languages, for example, in Swedish and Finnish. In these languages, the colon can even be found in the middle of a word, for example: H:ki, i.e. Helsinki. This punctuation mark phonetic transcription indicates the length of the sound after which it is located. That is, in this case, it carries the function of a diacritical mark.

In the grammar of L. Zizinia (1596), the colon occurs with a meaning close to the sign [;]. M. Smotrytsky called it a colon. TO modern meaning[:] approached in the "Russian Grammar" by M. Lomonosov. In the function of a separating sign, the colon began to be used from the end of the 16th century.

Who needed to invent punctuation marks. Periods still come in handy, but those confusing comma and dash rules that are an integral part of literate writing seem to have been invented to mock schoolchildren. At the dawn of the history of the development of writing, writers and readers did without them for thousands of years, but then something changed. Did they just get bored?

Librarian from Alexandria

In the third century BC, in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, which at that time was part of Greece, the librarian Aristophanes worked. He was in charge of the city's most famous library, where hundreds of thousands of scrolls were collected. Their reading took a lot of time, approximately each text looked like this. There was no separation between words, lowercase and uppercase letters, and, most importantly, punctuation in the sentence was completely absent. A doppelgänger's dream!

To understand such a text, the reader needed a lot of time, first it was necessary to isolate the words, then to understand where one thought ends and the next one begins. In fact, in those distant times, oratory and persuasive Speaking were more important than writing. At the dawn of Greek and Roman democracy, all issues were discussed publicly, and in order to promote their ideas, a politician had to be eloquent and persuasive.

At that time, no one was reading newspapers and brochures about the upcoming elections, and people did not need to be literate in order to understand who is who. The lyrics were never read in public. When one day a writer named Aulus Gellius was asked to read an unfamiliar document aloud, he refused, declaring that he would not mutilate his speech. It was simply impossible to understand the text at the first reading. And poor Aristophanes had to deal with all these illegible scrolls. No wonder the librarian decided to make his life easier.

The appearance of the first punctuation marks in the history of punctuation

Aristophanes suggested separating the continuous flow of text by upper middle ( ), lower (.) and upper (˙) dots. He called them "subordinate", "intermediate", and complete. The dots corresponded to the length of the pauses in colloquial speech, which has now been replaced by a comma, a colon, and a full stop. Of course, this was not yet punctuation, in the form that we know now. Aristophanes emphasized merely pauses in pronunciation, not grammatical boundaries, but the seed was sown.

Aristophanes' system did not last very long. Soon Greece was conquered by Rome, and the fearless conquerors abandoned the distinction of thought. famous speaker Cicero stated that the end of a sentence should not be determined by the pauses of the breath speaker or the whim of the scribe, but by the coherence of the rhythm. The cult of oratory was so developed that the dots separating words seemed superfluous to the Romans.

Crusade

Oddly enough, the emergence of Christianity influenced the history of punctuation. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the pagans of the once great country began a hopeless struggle against the new religion. Traditionally, in pagan religions, traditions and legends were passed from mouth to mouth. Christians preferred to use writing to memorize and spread their psalms and gospels. It was one of the first media wins.

Books have become an integral part of Christian identity. Decorative writing and paragraphing appeared, often richly illustrated with gold leaf and elaborate paintings. As Christianity spread throughout Europe, it brought with it not only new ideas about life and God, but also updated punctuation. In the 6th century, Christian writers began to put in emphasis to defend the meaning of their work. Readers received more legible information.

The first steps in the formation of punctuation

In the 7th century, Isidore of Seville, the first archbishop who after his death was named a blessed saint for his many religious merits, described an updated version of Aristophanes' punctuation. Pauses were also separated by dots: short (.), medium ( ) and long (˙). In addition to his contribution to the history of the development of writing, Isidore wrote the world's first encyclopedia. After the advent of the Internet, Isidore of Seville was chosen as the patron of the global information network, and although the Vatican does not say anything about it, in many countries the day of the Network is celebrated on the birthday of the saint - April 4th.

At about the same time that Isidore introduced dots to emphasize pauses, Irish and Scottish monks, tired of separating unfamiliar Latin words, began to make breaks between them. The gaps made life much easier for both scribes and readers.

At the end of the 8th century, the king of nascent Germany, Charles, ordered a monk named Alcuin to develop a single alphabet that could be read by all his subjects, even in remote regions. This is how lower and upper case appeared, and legalized punctuation became an integral part of the new rules. It has become one of the most milestones in the history of the development of writing.

Pushed boundaries

Small points of Aristophanes began to be used everywhere. Writers began to expand the number of punctuation marks and used signs from musical notation for this. The first attempts to single out interrogative sentences appeared. The three dots of the original punctuation began to give way to other characters, until one dot remained at the end of the sentence.

In the 12th century, the Italian writer Buoncompagno de Signa proposed a completely new punctuation with two characters: a slash (/) to pause and a dash (-) to end a speech. The fate of the dash de Signa was lost in the centuries, and the invention of the slash was an unequivocal success, it was compact, easy to write and visually stood out from the rest of the characters. Soon she began to displace the point of Aristophanes, like a comma general purpose or pauses, and "lazy" writers eventually changed it appearance to the familiar to us - (,).

Resurgence in the history of punctuation

The Renaissance became a landmark in the development of many sciences and arts, grammar did not stand aside, a mixture of ancient Greek dots was added: a colon and a question mark. A little later, the slash and dash familiar to us appeared. Writers and readers felt quite comfortable with the new signs, and when the Bible was published by Johannes Gutenberg in the 1450s, punctuation froze in its development. For about fifty years, the symbols practically did not change, only an exclamation mark appeared, the comma took on its usual form, and the dot of Aristophanes became a symbol of a complete stop of thought. The standardization of printing stopped the history of punctuation. Nothing has changed for centuries.

Unexpected turn

The use of computers has led to the fact that punctuation marks have begun to change again, and not only because of the many characters on the keyboard, but also due to the appearance of familiar emoticons that have begun to accentuate emotions. It turned out that the development of punctuation did not end, but simply froze in anticipation of a new one. technological breakthrough to put in written language new designations. This is just the beginning, but people are already deciding how they will accentuate their thoughts and emotions for the next few hundred, maybe thousands of years.