Where does punctuation come from?! [18:55]

Transcript
· Introduction
0:00 · Where do all of our punctuation marks come from?
0:03 · How did we go from just these to all of these?
0:06 · Find out right now
0:08 · in another RobWords.
· The space between words
0:10 · Now, I'm going to start with something you perhaps weren't expecting.
0:14 · This.
0:15 · This here is the space we leave between words
0:20 · because before we get onto the dots, dashes and squiggles, it's worth a mention.
0:25 · We should not take these helpful little gaps that pace out our sentences for
0:29 · granted because they haven't always been a given.
0:32 · Did you know Greeks didn't use them?
0:34 · Their sentences were just one long string of letters.
0:38 · The Romans were just as bad.
0:40 · They experimented with putting dots between words for a bit but ditched
0:44 · that idea and went back to this interminable mess.
0:47 · All of this meant the Romans and Greeks were constantly having to
0:51 · reread things until they understood them.
0:54 · And what's more, they would do so out loud,
0:58 · because they found that the rhythms of speech helped them with the deciphering.
1:02 · You know, historians believe that literate members
1:04 · of these two supreme cultures did all of their reading out loud
1:10 · mumbling along with the text like, I dunno, modern-day six-year-olds.
1:15 · The practice of reading quietly in your head isn't thought to have been
1:18 · the norm until something like the 10th century.
1:21 · And only once English, Irish and German Christian scribes - sick to
1:25 · the gospels of impenetrable Latin prose - started putting spaces between the words.
1:32 · Hallelujah.
1:33 · But are spaces really punctuation?
· What is punctuation?
1:36 · Yeah, well… let's look at the word.
1:39 · Punctuation literally means "pointing" as in marking with a point.
1:45 · It's from the Latin for point, punct.
1:47 · And in fact, for several centuries we referred to punctuation as "pointing".
1:52 · The word "punctuation" was reserved for the dots used to mark vowel sounds in Hebrew.
1:56 · But us starting to use the word punctuation for all manner of
1:59 · markings is one of many pretentious developments during the renaissance.
· The first punctuation
2:04 · So let's do what those renaissance scholars would
2:06 · have bloomin' loved to have done and go back in time to antiquity.
2:11 · More precisely to the famous Library of Alexandria
2:15 · because that's where the story of our punctuation marks begins
2:19 · with a man called Aristophanes of Byzantium.
2:22 · In around the 2nd century BC,
2:24 · he proposed a system to solve the problem of the unreadability of Greek writing,
2:29 · which had really hit a low point.
2:32 · And actually, that's precisely what he proposed: a low point. And a middle point. And a high point.
2:38 · Aristophanes put forward a system where dots would be used to mark in sentences
2:43 · where pauses of different lengths should occur.
2:47 · The middle one marked the shortest break. The bottom one,
2:50 · a little longer. And the top one, longer still.
2:53 · These were called comma, colon and periodos.
· Period/full (.) stop & comma (,)
2:58 · Hmm, familiar, right? Seems like a game-changer, doesn't it?
3:02 · Well no. The Romans had no interest in the idea and the practice died out.
3:07 · However, Hallelujah once more, because In the 6th century,
3:11 · Christian writers began to use punctuation again to help clarify their writings.
3:16 · They were much more keen on spreading their
3:17 · religion on paper than the pagan polytheists who came before them.
3:22 · You see, they'd written this book called the Bible, and it was like a bible to them
3:27 · and they wanted to leave minimal space for ambiguity when spreading the word of God.
3:32 · Punctuation was a great way to do that.
3:35 · So they reverted back to something very similar to Aristophanes' system.
3:39 · However, instead of representing pauses, the dots played a grammatical role,
3:45 · which is what punctuation does to this day.
3:48 · The periodos - having been rechristened the
3:50 · distinctio finalis - was now the marker of the end of a sentence
3:55 · and the colon and comma broke the sentence up into clauses.
3:59 · So now we're getting there, aren't we?
4:01 · But then, a problem arose.
4:03 · These three points worked well with the consistent heights of
4:07 · Roman majuscule lettering - what we call capital or upper case today -
4:12 · but scribes had also started to write with lower case minuscule
4:16 · letters of different heights with tall stretchy bits and pendulous dangly bits.
4:22 · And suddenly it was less easy to tell whether a dot was at the bottom,
4:27 · at the top or somewhere in the middle.
4:30 · So the system all but falls apart, and just one of the dots survives.
4:35 · But that dot is with us now. It is the period or "full stop",
4:40 · because that's what it originally marked.
4:43 · Meanwhile, a new way of denoting a mid-sentence pause had emerged.
4:47 · It was called the virgule and was like a forward slash.
4:51 · However, over time it shrunk, gained a cute little curl and became our comma,
4:58 · named after Aristophanes's original marker.
5:01 · Incidentally a comma is still called a virgule in French and a virgola in Italian.
5:07 · I bet I've said that wrong, sorry.
5:08 · Anyway, scholars from both countries played a huge part in all of this.
· Colon (:) & semicolon (;)
5:12 · So that's the period/full stop and the comma covered.
5:15 · But what happened with the colon? And it's half-sibling the semicolon?
5:21 · Well, the colon, despite sharing a name with one of Aristophanes's OG pause markers,
5:26 · actually started out life as this: the punctus elevātus.
5:30 · It was originally used in the notation of Gregorian
5:34 · chants and it told whoever was doing the chanting
5:37 · - a monk, I guess -
5:39 · that they were supposed to both pause and change tone at this point
5:43 · hence the two elements to it.
5:46 · That pause was a medium-length pause and we
5:49 · now use a simplified version of it for something similar:
5:53 · at the start of a list or when further explanation is on the way.
5:57 · The semicolon originates in another similar looking symbol,
6:01 · the punctus versus or "facing mark".
6:05 · It was used by mediaeval scribes to denote the end
6:07 · of a sentence and that usage hasn't changed as much as you might think
6:11 · because very often you can just replace a semi-colon with a full
6:15 · stop and your writing still makes perfect sense.
6:19 · It's quite common for people to struggle with
6:20 · the different uses of colons and semicolons these days.
6:23 · I think it's partly because, despite the colon looking the more final of the two in my view -
6:28 · It just looks harder than a semi -
6:29 · it's actually only the semicolon that can be replaced by a full stop.
6:34 · The semicolon joins two independent clauses. Here's an example:
6:39 · The internet can be a dangerous place; it's important to protect yourself online.
6:44 · You see, you could just as well write that as two sentences divided by a full stop.
6:49 · Meanwhile the colon introduces information set-up by what's come before it. For example:
6:55 · Luckily, there is a solution:
· NordVPN [redacted]
· Question mark (?)
7:56 · Now, a huge question mark hangs over the origin of the question mark.
8:01 · But shall I start with the leading theory?
8:04 · It's that our most charismatic of punctuation marks started out as this:
8:09 · the punctus interrogativus.
8:12 · Sounds promising, doesn't it? I mean that literally means question mark.
8:16 · This guy came about around 12-hundred years ago,
8:20 · in the court of Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor.
8:23 · The earliest usage we know of is in documents like this one
8:27 · from old Charlie's scriptorium in the beautiful city of Aachen.
8:31 · Check it out, it appears three times on this page alone, here, here and here.
8:37 · And in every case, it's at the end of a question.
8:42 · You see that "quid"? That means "what?" in Latin.
8:45 · And what this ascending squiggly line over a dot is telling the reader - so
8:50 · whoever is singing or reciting these lines - to do
8:53 · is to raise their intonation, then stop.
8:57 · Which is what we do when we ask a question, right?
9:00 · So it seems pretty open and shut to me that that eventually becomes our question mark.
9:05 · The problem is we don't have much evidence of the intermediate stages
9:09 · and there's a big gap between those documents and it popping up elsewhere.
9:13 · However, the theory is still better than the alternatives, one of which
9:16 · is that the question mark started out life as an Egyptian hieroglyph of a cat's tail.
9:22 · Cats apparently curl their tails when they're curious about something.
9:27 · The Egyptians did love cats, but I couldn't find that hieroglyph.
9:31 · Plus what's the dot supposed to represent?
9:33 · Another more complete theory is that it's formed
9:36 · from the first and last letters of the Latin word for "a question", quaestio.
9:41 · Monks would sometimes save space by writing letters on top of one another
9:45 · like the squiggle on the top of some Ns in Spanish,
9:47 · the enye, started out as an N on top of an N.
9:52 · Anyway, the writing of that Q and O may have got
9:55 · sloppier and sloppier over time until we got to what we have now.
10:00 · But again, where's the evidence of these intermediate phases?
10:04 · If you've got some, let me know.
10:07 · So I'm giving the boffins in Charlemagne's scriptorium the credit for the question mark.
· Exclamation mark/point (!)
10:12 · However, the quaestio theory has one other thing going for it:
10:17 · It fits very neatly with the leading theory about another punctuation mark.
10:22 · The BANG! Also known as, the exclamation mark-slash-point.
10:27 · So it's thought that this line over a dot started out as a line next to a circle, spelling out "IO!"
10:35 · which is itself a Latin exclamation.
10:38 · It could be used to suggest joy like "hurraaaay"
10:42 · or it could just draw attention to something, like "yo!"
10:46 · Yo!
10:48 · I can't do that convincingly.
10:49 · Again, thrifty scribes wanting to save on paper supposedly started to put the i above the o,
10:55 · and that gradually simplified into something called the punctus
10:59 · admirativus or punctus exclamtivus, which becomes our exclamation mark-slash-point.
11:05 · I mentioned this is also called a "bang" - hence this emphatic questioning symbol
11:10 · that never caught on is called the interrobang,
11:13 · It is an interrogative bang.
11:16 · Printers have lots of other nicknames for the exclamation mark too. Among
11:20 · them apparently are "the screamer", "the gasper" and "the dog's di-"
11:26 · I'm not saying that one.
11:27 · Whatever they're called, one must be careful
11:29 · not to overuse them, lest one seem uncoolly overenthusiastic or even out and out insane.
11:37 · F Scott Fitzgerald - author of the Great Gatsby wasn't a fan either - he said using one was
11:44 · "like laughing at your own joke".
· Quotation marks (")
11:49 · Okay, what's going on with these?
11:50 · Let's talk about quotation marks next.
11:52 · Quotation marks are a funny one. We still don't seem to
11:54 · have made up our mind what to do with them.
11:57 · Should they come alone or in pairs, face one another, be flipped over,
12:02 · sit on the ground, be pointy, curved or straight -
12:06 · all of those are used around Europe, by the way.
12:08 · Well, whatever your preference or preferences,
12:11 · they're all thought to originate in the same place.
12:15 · Meet this sharp-looking fellow. His name is diple,
12:18 · which is adorable and means double in Ancient Greek.
12:21 · He's so called because it takes two lines to draw him.
12:25 · This symbol was used by librarians back at the ancient Library of Alexandria
12:29 · again to flag up important sections of text.
12:33 · It was placed in the margin - here it is being used on a Greek papyrus from
12:37 · the second or third century. Pretty cool right?
12:39 · It was also sometimes placed at either end of the line.
12:43 · So it flagged up something important and
12:46 · for later Christian scholars "important" very often meant a quote from the bible.
12:51 · So they start marking quotes from the bible with these symbols.
12:55 · Then they start to use them to mark out quotes from elsewhere.
12:59 · In the meantime, the printing press comes along
13:02 · and it becomes awkward to put these chevrons in the margin.
13:06 · So they migrate into the body of the text itself, neatly bookending -
13:11 · Is that a pun? If it is, excuse it.
13:14 · - these quotes.
13:15 · But another problem thrown up by the presses
13:17 · is that printers often didn't have a cute little diple to use,
13:21 · so they improvised drafting in things like commas to use instead.
13:27 · But to mark them out from other commas they inverted them - hence inverted commas -
13:32 · or doubled them or did both.
13:35 · Ta daaaa.
13:37 · A few European languages still mark out quotes
13:39 · with a double double diple - so, a double double double.
13:43 · This system appears to have been pioneered by a fella called Guillaume
13:47 · because they were named after him.
· Brackets (())
13:50 · Now these pairs of diple are rather similar to angle brackets we sometimes
13:54 · use today or chevrons aren't they? So let's go there next.
13:58 · Brackets or parentheses start to pop up in manuscripts from the 14th century onwards.
14:05 · To start with, they are indeed pointy. But by the 16th century they have taken on a smoother shape.
14:11 · Here they are being somewhat overused in that period.
14:14 · They'd smoothened sufficiently enough for the
14:16 · theologian Erasmus to coin a darling new name for them.
14:19 · He described how asides could be marked out with two little moons, which he called lunulae.
14:26 · Nowadays we have all kinds of brackets to choose from
14:29 · but if you're talking about medieval manuscripts and using the word brackets,
14:32 · you're actually most likely to be referring to the curly whirly kind,
14:36 · which were scrawled all over old documents to help direct the attention of readers to the right bits.
14:42 · But today, we most commonly use brackets when we want to include an aside or something like that.
14:48 · The word parenthesis comes from the Greek for "to put in beside".
14:53 · It's for squeezing in extra bits of information.
· Dash (–) & hyphen (-)
14:57 · But brackets aren't the only means through which we do this.
15:00 · You can use a pair of commas
15:02 · Or - if you really want to accentuate the additional remark - you can use a pair of dashes.
15:09 · Now, this is a pretty new invention from the 18th century.
15:13 · The hyphen though, which is like the dash but shorter, has been around much much longer.
15:19 · It starts to show up in manuscripts from the late 13th century to show
15:24 · where a word has been split between two lines - just the same as we use it now.
15:29 · We also use the hyphen to either join together two words or separate parts of a compound word
15:34 · I actually can't quite get my head around which of those it's primarily doing.
15:38 · Who cares, I suppose, it's going to die out one day anyway.
15:40 · I mean, they're all disappearing.
15:42 · But that usage relates nicely to what the Greeks originally dubbed the "hyphen".
15:47 · It was a little crescent that they'd pop underneath a compound
15:51 · to show that it should be read as a single word.
15:55 · The word "hyphen" comes from the Greek for "together" or "in one".
· Apostrophe (')
16:00 · Another punctuation mark etymology that gives
16:02 · a clue to its original use is that of the apostrophe.
16:05 · The apostrophe starts out life as a medieval marker of omission,
16:10 · meaning it shows where something has been left out of a word,
16:13 · a letter or a few letters.
16:16 · And the word apostrophe comes from a Greek word meaning "to turn away".
16:21 · The idea is that you have turned away from part of the word.
16:25 · Incidentally, the word apostrophe also describes a rhetorical device where someone turns away from
16:30 · their audience to address someone or something else either present or otherwise or even dead
16:35 · like when Hamlet switches to addressing the skull of the jester Yorrick:
16:40 · "Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs?"
16:44 · He's dead mate.
16:45 · Anyway we're concerned with the punctuation mark the apostrophe,
16:48 · which still marks where some letters have been missed out, as it always has done.
16:52 · But we also have this curious extra use of it to show possession.
16:58 · And the reason for this is really stupid.
17:01 · It's the result of a misconception that this is an abbreviation of the word "his"
17:06 · so that Mike's house should be "Mike his house" and you can actually find
17:12 · examples of that formulation being used as a kind of overcorrection.
17:16 · It is rubbish though.
17:18 · In Old English you just stuck an S on the end of a
17:20 · noun to reference it belonging to someone with no apostrophe needed.
17:24 · "Oh silly apostrophe, what are you doing there?"
· Ellipsis (...)
17:28 · Right, next we shall go for… dot dot dot…
17:31 · ellipsis.
17:32 · An ellipsis - that trio of dots - ultimately conveys silence
17:37 · for example, through a lapse, a deliberate interruption,
17:41 · or because a writer doesn't want to bother you with a full quote.
17:44 · The use of ellipses is primarily a dramatic device.
17:48 · They are all about the interruption of speech, so it's no surprise that they first appear in plays.
17:56 · One of the earliest examples of it is here,
17:58 · where it is actually a stream of dashes and marks an interruption.
18:03 · This is from 1588, so during Shakespeare's lifetime.
18:08 · Why the three - or more - dots or dashes though?
18:11 · Well, one of the reasons will have been that printers were just using what they had.
18:15 · And they had periods up the wazoo.
18:16 · And as for the writers themselves… well isn't there just something about
18:20 · these trailing dots that just suggests things left unsaid?
18:24 · Ellipsis comes from the Greek for "to come short" and ellipses are a great
18:28 · way of leaving someone wanting more.
18:32 · So let me attempt to do exactly that by ending here.
18:35 · Thanks a lot for watching. If you've enjoyed this video, I recommend watching this one next.
18:39 · And also, I've just created a load of wordy nerdy tshirt designs.
· MERCH!
18:42 · You should check those out - I'll leave a link below.
18:45 · And also, get on that big old NordVPN deal too.
18:50 · That's all from me this time.
18:52 · Period.
18:53 · Full stop.

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Transcript
	·	Introduction
0:00	·	Where do all of our punctuation marks come from?
0:03	·	How did we go from just these to all of these?
0:06	·	Find out right now
0:08	·	in another RobWords.
	·	The space between words
0:10	·	Now, I'm going to start with something you perhaps weren't expecting.
0:14	·	This.
0:15	·	This here is the space we leave between words
0:20	·	because before we get onto the dots, dashes and squiggles, it's worth a mention.
0:25	·	We should not take these helpful little gaps that pace out our sentences for
0:29	·	granted because they haven't always been a given.
0:32	·	Did you know Greeks didn't use them?
0:34	·	Their sentences were just one long string of letters.
0:38	·	The Romans were just as bad.
0:40	·	They experimented with putting dots between words for a bit but ditched
0:44	·	that idea and went back to this interminable mess.
0:47	·	All of this meant the Romans and Greeks were constantly having to
0:51	·	reread things until they understood them.
0:54	·	And what's more, they would do so out loud,
0:58	·	because they found that the rhythms of speech helped them with the deciphering.
1:02	·	You know, historians believe that literate members
1:04	·	of these two supreme cultures did all of their reading out loud
1:10	·	mumbling along with the text like, I dunno, modern-day six-year-olds.
1:15	·	The practice of reading quietly in your head isn't thought to have been
1:18	·	the norm until something like the 10th century.
1:21	·	And only once English, Irish and German Christian scribes - sick to
1:25	·	the gospels of impenetrable Latin prose - started putting spaces between the words.
1:32	·	Hallelujah.
1:33	·	But are spaces really punctuation?
	·	What is punctuation?
1:36	·	Yeah, well… let's look at the word.
1:39	·	Punctuation literally means "pointing" as in marking with a point.
1:45	·	It's from the Latin for point, punct.
1:47	·	And in fact, for several centuries we referred to punctuation as "pointing".
1:52	·	The word "punctuation" was reserved for the dots used to mark vowel sounds in Hebrew.
1:56	·	But us starting to use the word punctuation for all manner of
1:59	·	markings is one of many pretentious developments during the renaissance.
	·	The first punctuation
2:04	·	So let's do what those renaissance scholars would
2:06	·	have bloomin' loved to have done and go back in time to antiquity.
2:11	·	More precisely to the famous Library of Alexandria
2:15	·	because that's where the story of our punctuation marks begins
2:19	·	with a man called Aristophanes of Byzantium.
2:22	·	In around the 2nd century BC,
2:24	·	he proposed a system to solve the problem of the unreadability of Greek writing,
2:29	·	which had really hit a low point.
2:32	·	And actually, that's precisely what he proposed: a low point. And a middle point. And a high point.
2:38	·	Aristophanes put forward a system where dots would be used to mark in sentences
2:43	·	where pauses of different lengths should occur.
2:47	·	The middle one marked the shortest break. The bottom one,
2:50	·	a little longer. And the top one, longer still.
2:53	·	These were called comma, colon and periodos.
	·	Period/full (.) stop & comma (,)
2:58	·	Hmm, familiar, right? Seems like a game-changer, doesn't it?
3:02	·	Well no. The Romans had no interest in the idea and the practice died out.
3:07	·	However, Hallelujah once more, because In the 6th century,
3:11	·	Christian writers began to use punctuation again to help clarify their writings.
3:16	·	They were much more keen on spreading their
3:17	·	religion on paper than the pagan polytheists who came before them.
3:22	·	You see, they'd written this book called the Bible, and it was like a bible to them
3:27	·	and they wanted to leave minimal space for ambiguity when spreading the word of God.
3:32	·	Punctuation was a great way to do that.
3:35	·	So they reverted back to something very similar to Aristophanes' system.
3:39	·	However, instead of representing pauses, the dots played a grammatical role,
3:45	·	which is what punctuation does to this day.
3:48	·	The periodos - having been rechristened the
3:50	·	distinctio finalis - was now the marker of the end of a sentence
3:55	·	and the colon and comma broke the sentence up into clauses.
3:59	·	So now we're getting there, aren't we?
4:01	·	But then, a problem arose.
4:03	·	These three points worked well with the consistent heights of
4:07	·	Roman majuscule lettering - what we call capital or upper case today -
4:12	·	but scribes had also started to write with lower case minuscule
4:16	·	letters of different heights with tall stretchy bits and pendulous dangly bits.
4:22	·	And suddenly it was less easy to tell whether a dot was at the bottom,
4:27	·	at the top or somewhere in the middle.
4:30	·	So the system all but falls apart, and just one of the dots survives.
4:35	·	But that dot is with us now. It is the period or "full stop",
4:40	·	because that's what it originally marked.
4:43	·	Meanwhile, a new way of denoting a mid-sentence pause had emerged.
4:47	·	It was called the virgule and was like a forward slash.
4:51	·	However, over time it shrunk, gained a cute little curl and became our comma,
4:58	·	named after Aristophanes's original marker.
5:01	·	Incidentally a comma is still called a virgule in French and a virgola in Italian.
5:07	·	I bet I've said that wrong, sorry.
5:08	·	Anyway, scholars from both countries played a huge part in all of this.
	·	Colon (:) & semicolon (;)
5:12	·	So that's the period/full stop and the comma covered.
5:15	·	But what happened with the colon? And it's half-sibling the semicolon?
5:21	·	Well, the colon, despite sharing a name with one of Aristophanes's OG pause markers,
5:26	·	actually started out life as this: the punctus elevātus.
5:30	·	It was originally used in the notation of Gregorian
5:34	·	chants and it told whoever was doing the chanting
5:37	·	- a monk, I guess -
5:39	·	that they were supposed to both pause and change tone at this point
5:43	·	hence the two elements to it.
5:46	·	That pause was a medium-length pause and we
5:49	·	now use a simplified version of it for something similar:
5:53	·	at the start of a list or when further explanation is on the way.
5:57	·	The semicolon originates in another similar looking symbol,
6:01	·	the punctus versus or "facing mark".
6:05	·	It was used by mediaeval scribes to denote the end
6:07	·	of a sentence and that usage hasn't changed as much as you might think
6:11	·	because very often you can just replace a semi-colon with a full
6:15	·	stop and your writing still makes perfect sense.
6:19	·	It's quite common for people to struggle with
6:20	·	the different uses of colons and semicolons these days.
6:23	·	I think it's partly because, despite the colon looking the more final of the two in my view -
6:28	·	It just looks harder than a semi -
6:29	·	it's actually only the semicolon that can be replaced by a full stop.
6:34	·	The semicolon joins two independent clauses. Here's an example:
6:39	·	The internet can be a dangerous place; it's important to protect yourself online.
6:44	·	You see, you could just as well write that as two sentences divided by a full stop.
6:49	·	Meanwhile the colon introduces information set-up by what's come before it. For example:
6:55	·	Luckily, there is a solution:
	·	NordVPN [redacted]
	·	Question mark (?)
7:56	·	Now, a huge question mark hangs over the origin of the question mark.
8:01	·	But shall I start with the leading theory?
8:04	·	It's that our most charismatic of punctuation marks started out as this:
8:09	·	the punctus interrogativus.
8:12	·	Sounds promising, doesn't it? I mean that literally means question mark.
8:16	·	This guy came about around 12-hundred years ago,
8:20	·	in the court of Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor.
8:23	·	The earliest usage we know of is in documents like this one
8:27	·	from old Charlie's scriptorium in the beautiful city of Aachen.
8:31	·	Check it out, it appears three times on this page alone, here, here and here.
8:37	·	And in every case, it's at the end of a question.
8:42	·	You see that "quid"? That means "what?" in Latin.
8:45	·	And what this ascending squiggly line over a dot is telling the reader - so
8:50	·	whoever is singing or reciting these lines - to do
8:53	·	is to raise their intonation, then stop.
8:57	·	Which is what we do when we ask a question, right?
9:00	·	So it seems pretty open and shut to me that that eventually becomes our question mark.
9:05	·	The problem is we don't have much evidence of the intermediate stages
9:09	·	and there's a big gap between those documents and it popping up elsewhere.
9:13	·	However, the theory is still better than the alternatives, one of which
9:16	·	is that the question mark started out life as an Egyptian hieroglyph of a cat's tail.
9:22	·	Cats apparently curl their tails when they're curious about something.
9:27	·	The Egyptians did love cats, but I couldn't find that hieroglyph.
9:31	·	Plus what's the dot supposed to represent?
9:33	·	Another more complete theory is that it's formed
9:36	·	from the first and last letters of the Latin word for "a question", quaestio.
9:41	·	Monks would sometimes save space by writing letters on top of one another
9:45	·	like the squiggle on the top of some Ns in Spanish,
9:47	·	the enye, started out as an N on top of an N.
9:52	·	Anyway, the writing of that Q and O may have got
9:55	·	sloppier and sloppier over time until we got to what we have now.
10:00	·	But again, where's the evidence of these intermediate phases?
10:04	·	If you've got some, let me know.
10:07	·	So I'm giving the boffins in Charlemagne's scriptorium the credit for the question mark.
	·	Exclamation mark/point (!)
10:12	·	However, the quaestio theory has one other thing going for it:
10:17	·	It fits very neatly with the leading theory about another punctuation mark.
10:22	·	The BANG! Also known as, the exclamation mark-slash-point.
10:27	·	So it's thought that this line over a dot started out as a line next to a circle, spelling out "IO!"
10:35	·	which is itself a Latin exclamation.
10:38	·	It could be used to suggest joy like "hurraaaay"
10:42	·	or it could just draw attention to something, like "yo!"
10:46	·	Yo!
10:48	·	I can't do that convincingly.
10:49	·	Again, thrifty scribes wanting to save on paper supposedly started to put the i above the o,
10:55	·	and that gradually simplified into something called the punctus
10:59	·	admirativus or punctus exclamtivus, which becomes our exclamation mark-slash-point.
11:05	·	I mentioned this is also called a "bang" - hence this emphatic questioning symbol
11:10	·	that never caught on is called the interrobang,
11:13	·	It is an interrogative bang.
11:16	·	Printers have lots of other nicknames for the exclamation mark too. Among
11:20	·	them apparently are "the screamer", "the gasper" and "the dog's di-"
11:26	·	I'm not saying that one.
11:27	·	Whatever they're called, one must be careful
11:29	·	not to overuse them, lest one seem uncoolly overenthusiastic or even out and out insane.
11:37	·	F Scott Fitzgerald - author of the Great Gatsby wasn't a fan either - he said using one was
11:44	·	"like laughing at your own joke".
	·	Quotation marks (")
11:49	·	Okay, what's going on with these?
11:50	·	Let's talk about quotation marks next.
11:52	·	Quotation marks are a funny one. We still don't seem to
11:54	·	have made up our mind what to do with them.
11:57	·	Should they come alone or in pairs, face one another, be flipped over,
12:02	·	sit on the ground, be pointy, curved or straight -
12:06	·	all of those are used around Europe, by the way.
12:08	·	Well, whatever your preference or preferences,
12:11	·	they're all thought to originate in the same place.
12:15	·	Meet this sharp-looking fellow. His name is diple,
12:18	·	which is adorable and means double in Ancient Greek.
12:21	·	He's so called because it takes two lines to draw him.
12:25	·	This symbol was used by librarians back at the ancient Library of Alexandria
12:29	·	again to flag up important sections of text.
12:33	·	It was placed in the margin - here it is being used on a Greek papyrus from
12:37	·	the second or third century. Pretty cool right?
12:39	·	It was also sometimes placed at either end of the line.
12:43	·	So it flagged up something important and
12:46	·	for later Christian scholars "important" very often meant a quote from the bible.
12:51	·	So they start marking quotes from the bible with these symbols.
12:55	·	Then they start to use them to mark out quotes from elsewhere.
12:59	·	In the meantime, the printing press comes along
13:02	·	and it becomes awkward to put these chevrons in the margin.
13:06	·	So they migrate into the body of the text itself, neatly bookending -
13:11	·	Is that a pun? If it is, excuse it.
13:14	·	- these quotes.
13:15	·	But another problem thrown up by the presses
13:17	·	is that printers often didn't have a cute little diple to use,
13:21	·	so they improvised drafting in things like commas to use instead.
13:27	·	But to mark them out from other commas they inverted them - hence inverted commas -
13:32	·	or doubled them or did both.
13:35	·	Ta daaaa.
13:37	·	A few European languages still mark out quotes
13:39	·	with a double double diple - so, a double double double.
13:43	·	This system appears to have been pioneered by a fella called Guillaume
13:47	·	because they were named after him.
	·	Brackets (())
13:50	·	Now these pairs of diple are rather similar to angle brackets we sometimes
13:54	·	use today or chevrons aren't they? So let's go there next.
13:58	·	Brackets or parentheses start to pop up in manuscripts from the 14th century onwards.
14:05	·	To start with, they are indeed pointy. But by the 16th century they have taken on a smoother shape.
14:11	·	Here they are being somewhat overused in that period.
14:14	·	They'd smoothened sufficiently enough for the
14:16	·	theologian Erasmus to coin a darling new name for them.
14:19	·	He described how asides could be marked out with two little moons, which he called lunulae.
14:26	·	Nowadays we have all kinds of brackets to choose from
14:29	·	but if you're talking about medieval manuscripts and using the word brackets,
14:32	·	you're actually most likely to be referring to the curly whirly kind,
14:36	·	which were scrawled all over old documents to help direct the attention of readers to the right bits.
14:42	·	But today, we most commonly use brackets when we want to include an aside or something like that.
14:48	·	The word parenthesis comes from the Greek for "to put in beside".
14:53	·	It's for squeezing in extra bits of information.
	·	Dash (–) & hyphen (-)
14:57	·	But brackets aren't the only means through which we do this.
15:00	·	You can use a pair of commas
15:02	·	Or - if you really want to accentuate the additional remark - you can use a pair of dashes.
15:09	·	Now, this is a pretty new invention from the 18th century.
15:13	·	The hyphen though, which is like the dash but shorter, has been around much much longer.
15:19	·	It starts to show up in manuscripts from the late 13th century to show
15:24	·	where a word has been split between two lines - just the same as we use it now.
15:29	·	We also use the hyphen to either join together two words or separate parts of a compound word
15:34	·	I actually can't quite get my head around which of those it's primarily doing.
15:38	·	Who cares, I suppose, it's going to die out one day anyway.
15:40	·	I mean, they're all disappearing.
15:42	·	But that usage relates nicely to what the Greeks originally dubbed the "hyphen".
15:47	·	It was a little crescent that they'd pop underneath a compound
15:51	·	to show that it should be read as a single word.
15:55	·	The word "hyphen" comes from the Greek for "together" or "in one".
	·	Apostrophe (')
16:00	·	Another punctuation mark etymology that gives
16:02	·	a clue to its original use is that of the apostrophe.
16:05	·	The apostrophe starts out life as a medieval marker of omission,
16:10	·	meaning it shows where something has been left out of a word,
16:13	·	a letter or a few letters.
16:16	·	And the word apostrophe comes from a Greek word meaning "to turn away".
16:21	·	The idea is that you have turned away from part of the word.
16:25	·	Incidentally, the word apostrophe also describes a rhetorical device where someone turns away from
16:30	·	their audience to address someone or something else either present or otherwise or even dead
16:35	·	like when Hamlet switches to addressing the skull of the jester Yorrick:
16:40	·	"Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs?"
16:44	·	He's dead mate.
16:45	·	Anyway we're concerned with the punctuation mark the apostrophe,
16:48	·	which still marks where some letters have been missed out, as it always has done.
16:52	·	But we also have this curious extra use of it to show possession.
16:58	·	And the reason for this is really stupid.
17:01	·	It's the result of a misconception that this is an abbreviation of the word "his"
17:06	·	so that Mike's house should be "Mike his house" and you can actually find
17:12	·	examples of that formulation being used as a kind of overcorrection.
17:16	·	It is rubbish though.
17:18	·	In Old English you just stuck an S on the end of a
17:20	·	noun to reference it belonging to someone with no apostrophe needed.
17:24	·	"Oh silly apostrophe, what are you doing there?"
	·	Ellipsis (...)
17:28	·	Right, next we shall go for… dot dot dot…
17:31	·	ellipsis.
17:32	·	An ellipsis - that trio of dots - ultimately conveys silence
17:37	·	for example, through a lapse, a deliberate interruption,
17:41	·	or because a writer doesn't want to bother you with a full quote.
17:44	·	The use of ellipses is primarily a dramatic device.
17:48	·	They are all about the interruption of speech, so it's no surprise that they first appear in plays.
17:56	·	One of the earliest examples of it is here,
17:58	·	where it is actually a stream of dashes and marks an interruption.
18:03	·	This is from 1588, so during Shakespeare's lifetime.
18:08	·	Why the three - or more - dots or dashes though?
18:11	·	Well, one of the reasons will have been that printers were just using what they had.
18:15	·	And they had periods up the wazoo.
18:16	·	And as for the writers themselves… well isn't there just something about
18:20	·	these trailing dots that just suggests things left unsaid?
18:24	·	Ellipsis comes from the Greek for "to come short" and ellipses are a great
18:28	·	way of leaving someone wanting more.
18:32	·	So let me attempt to do exactly that by ending here.
18:35	·	Thanks a lot for watching. If you've enjoyed this video, I recommend watching this one next.
18:39	·	And also, I've just created a load of wordy nerdy tshirt designs.
	·	MERCH!
18:42	·	You should check those out - I'll leave a link below.
18:45	·	And also, get on that big old NordVPN deal too.
18:50	·	That's all from me this time.
18:52	·	Period.
18:53	·	Full stop.