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Today we expect written or printed prose to give us some kind of indication of how it is spoken.
Read the following examples:
THEFIREMANEXCLAIMEDGETOUTOFHERETHISPLACEISONFIRE
The fireman exclaimed; "Get out of here, this place is on fire!"
In the first example we need to hunt for each individual word in the string of characters and assemble on our own. Only when we comprehend the meaning of the entire phrase can we guess at the author's intention in conveying emotion and dramatic pause.
Unbelievably, our literate Greco-Roman ancestors would find modern text unfamiliar. Their manuscripts, tablets, and monumental inscriptions were rendered as a series of characters representing words with no space or punctuation. These ancient readers most likely read aloud to themselves sounding out letters and inserting pause and intonation after they grasped the meaning of phrases.
Just as our Western alphabet has evolved to meet the needs of readers and writers, so has the way we intersperse space and analphabetic symbols (those that do not represent a sound) in our written and printed text. Additionally, a sort of shorthand was slowly added to our character set. Special symbols, sometimes what we might consider a ligature, were developed to convey a specific meaning.
Early spacing and insertion of dots and dashes was not what we would consider punctuation, but rather stage directions for a reader. In a world where literacy was a privilege of royalty and the wealthy, many texts were written for oral delivery to those who could not read.
As the Western world became united by the Roman Empire, and subsequently under the proselytizing influence of the Roman Catholic Church, accuracy in stage direction became more important.
Spacing and Early Punctuation
Around 200 BCE the Greek scholar and librarian, Aristophanes, introduced a system using dots placed at varying heights in strategic places to represent a short pause, a long pause, and a full stop. Aristophanes' system was not widely adopted. By the first century BCE, it had fallen out of fashion. Around this time the Romans began to use a small dot, or midpoint, called an interpunct to mark a division between words. Soon after, however, a renewed interest in Greek language and scholarship swept through the Roman Empire, and the lowly interpunct disappeared as well.
Interestingly, the privileged children of the Roman Empire were taught to read and write Latin with grammar manuscripts employing word spaces so these young students could learn the language. Consequently, spaces between words were considered childish and illiterate. Some language scholars will also argue that the Latin language has such uniform grammatical constructions that spacing and punctuation was not as critical as it is to the languages it spawned.
With the Roman Empire in decline during second
and third centuries CE, the Roman Catholic Church is credited with keeping literacy alive in a chaotic Europe. Through its network of bishops based throughout the former empire, bibles, religious commentary, and other manuscripts were traded between monasteries for duplication for the purpose of converting the barbarians of Europe. In the 6th century CE, the aforementioned children's grammar manuscripts made their way to monastic scribes in Britannia and Ireland who were
just learning the Latin language. It is these monastic scribes who first began to use word spacing in any consistent way.
Around this time, our modern-day romance languages were developing. The local vernacular was merging with Latin, the lingua franca of the day. Latin grammatical constructions were not as easily adapted. Consequently, a need for transcription with clear stage direction was arising.
The Carolingian Empire, begun by Frankish kings originating in modern-day Germany and Northern France, became a dominant power in Europe from about 750 to 900 CE. They subsequently converted to Christianity and held some power over the Roman Catholic Church. One of these later kings, Charlemagne (hence Carolingian), established a centralized scriptorium for his empire. It was from here that space between words, along with capitalization of the first word of a phrase, use of paragraphs to indicate a new train of thought, and the beginnings of uppercase and lowercase letterforms were standardized and popularized throughout Europe.
Beginnings of Punctuation: Period, Comma, Slash, and Colon
Although the word-separation issue had been resolved to some degree, the representation of natural pauses, emphasis, and halt of the spoken word in written form was left to the discretion and style of the scriptorium producing the manuscript. Aristophanes' system was rediscovered and was introduced into medieval manuscripts. Aristophanes' dot, called a komma, was placed at the top of line, mid-level, or at the bottom to represent what we now think of as a colon, comma, and period. However the komma was not universally used. Some scribes employed the slash to indicate pause: one slash mark indicating a comma, two indicating a dash.
Eventually the komma on the baseline became our modern-day period. The slash however took two different routes; the single and double slash were used interchangeably. Eventually the double slash became horizontal (like an equal sign) and finally evolved into a single slash on the horizontal — the dash, as we know it today. In the 16th and 17th centuries our modern-day colon and semicolon were developed to further convey an author's intention in written text.
Medieval scribes, whether for speed, economy, or artistic license, also began to employ a small dash for a continuation of a word (hyphen) and invented abbreviations for frequently used words. The ampersand is one of their creations. It is the amalgamation of the lowercase letters E and T, the Latin word for and. The E and T letterforms can easily be discerned in the ampersand of some fonts, while it is stylized in other faces looking like a kind of uppercase backward S (the simple cross form is theft of the addition sign from mathematical notation). These innovations in transcribing analphabetic characters and use of space were by no means universal. Writing, like any communication system, needs wide adoption.
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Sidebar:
Eternal Damnation for a Typo
Severe punishment, or worse, the threat of an afterlife in hell, was motivation for medieval scribes. Moreover, these religious men believed that every word they wrote was a strike against Satan, and each work they produced brought them one step closer to a life in heaven after death. How do we know that monks were our early typesetters? Why did they join these religious organizations and how did they live? The scribes themselves left us clues in religious manuscripts and plenty of detail on the histories of monasteries they crafted.
Monasticism and the scribal tradition were not inventions of early Christians, however they employed them to establish their early church. In the first few centuries CE, Christian leaders realized they needed a common doctrine in order to establish their burgeoning religion. Literate Christian monks, devoting their lives to solitude, prayer, and contemplation, supplied the written documentation. One of the most famous leaders of these early monasteries was St. Jerome (340 - 420 CE) who declared that copying texts was one of the most appropriate tasks of monastic life. By the sixth century, scribes were toiling at every monastery in the Christian world.
Men joined a monastery out of a religious conviction, or out of a need to escape poverty, or the chaos of a Europe ravaged by invading Germanic tribes. Those who had a facility for pen on parchment became scribes. We can't assume all monks could read and write — some were mere copyists. Their lives were humble and regimented. The scribe's work was not only a religious avocation; it meant revenue for the monastery, especially when rich patrons from the secular world began to pay for handsomely produced manuscripts for their private libraries.
A scribal monk usually worked about six hours a day in a writing room with a window and desk. Artificial light was prohibited as it could destroy the work being copied or other manuscripts stored in the room. Complete silence was required for concentration and prayerful attention to the task at hand. As a monastery's production increased, a larger light-filled scriptorium was constructed with small work areas, called carrels, for each scribe. The scribe received his assignment from the boss of the scriptorium, the amarius. The amarius would oversee his scribal team, and in smaller operations he may have proofread the material. He was also responsible for doling out severe punishments for mistakes in the copy.
To begin his assignment, the scribe cut parchment to size according to the specifications supplied to him by the amarius. The parchment, made of animal skin, was scored to produce baseline guides for the script. The score marks were deep enough to appear on the opposite side of the parchment as well. Ink produced at the monasteries was applied with a broad-nib pen. When sinful mistakes and typographical errors were made, the parchment skin was scrubbed clean. In fact, with modern scientific methods, manuscripts that were scrubbed cleaned to be reused for other texts have been discovered. Scribes generally worked on a text from start to finish. Other monks specialized in applying the ornate initial capitals we have come to associate with medieval manuscripts. The jobs of creating book covers from parchment-covered wood or metal and binding the finished works were assigned to monks specializing in these tasks.
The monastic scribe did enjoy some artistic freedom. We know that monks produced these manuscripts because at the conclusion of the text, they would often note their name and the monastery they came from. In place of a name, the more humble would conclude with the phrase graphetis; oide theos, translated from Latin: Who wrote this? God knows. These scribes also had a sense of humor. Some concluded the text with a simple amen or explicuit feliciter, thank goodness it's finished.
