Let’s start today’s blog by reading these two sentences out loud.

Women, without her man, is nothing.

Women: without her, man is nothing.

We are all familiar with them!  At times, we misuse and abuse them. Punctuation marks are those little symbols that indicate the structure and organization of language or reflect intonation and pauses. So who invented punctuation marks?

The earliest writings had no spaces, no capitalizations, no punctuation marks and no vowels. Wow, try reading this blog like that!  The oldest known documentent using punctuation, dates back to the 9th centuray BC – The Mesha Stele. It contains points between the words and dashes as punctuation marks.  The Greeks were using another form of punctuation by the 5th century BC – as vertically arranged dots indicating the end of a phrase. These were used by playwrights to tell the cast when pauses were needed during the performance of a play.

Fast-forward a few centuries to the 1400′s-1500′s – The rise of printing created a demand for a standardized punctuation system. And for these tiny symbols, we thank Mr. Aldus Manutius and his grandson. Manutius and grandson created the full stop or colon to end sentences [STOP!]. In the western world, punctuation marks became standardized by 1885.

Now let’s go back to those two first sentences I presented and read them out loud again without any punctuation. Pretty fun, eh?  There are many other examples out there. Can you find more? And if so, please share them with us by clicking on the post title and submitting your comments.

In the meantime, enjoy this funny video on punctuation by pianist and comedian Victor Borge!

-Team Libboo

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