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The English language is spoken by 750 million people in the world as either the official language of a nation, a second language, or in a mixture with other languages (such as pidgins and creoles.) English is the (or an) official language in England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; however, the United States has no official language.
The Romans (circa 1st century BC) also adopted symbols to indicate pauses.
Punctuation developed dramatically when large numbers of copies of the Christian Bible started to be produced. These were designed to be read aloud and the copyists began to introduce a range of marks to aid the reader, including indentation, various punctuation marks and an early version of initial capitals. St Jerome and his colleagues, who produced the Vulgate translation of the Bible into Latin, developed an early system (circa 400 AD); this was considerably improved on by Alcuin. The marks included the virgule (forward slash) and dots in different locations; the dots were centred in the line, raised or in groups.
The use of punctuation was not standardised until after the invention of printing. Credit for introducing a standard system is generally given to Aldus Manutius and his grandson. They popularized the practice of ending sentences with the colon or full stop, invented the semicolon, made occasional use of parentheses and created the modern comma by lowering the virgule.
The standards and limitations of evolving technologies have exercised further pragmatic influences. For example, minimisation of punctuation in typewritten matter became economically desirable in the 1960s and 1970s for the many users of carbon-film ribbons, since a period or comma consumed the same length of expensive non-reusable ribbon as did a capital letter.
Other European languages use much the same punctuation as English. The similarity is so strong that the few variations may confuse a native English reader. Quotation marks are particularly variable across European languages. For example, in French and Russian, quotes would appear as: « Je suis fatigué. » (in French, each "double punctuation," as the guillemet, requires a non-breaking space; in Russian it does not).
In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point (·), known as the ano teleia (άνω τελεία).
Arabic and Persian languages—written from right to left—use a reversed question mark: ؟, and a reversed comma: ، . This is a modern innovation; pre-modern Arabic did not use punctuation. Hebrew, which is also written from right to left, uses the same character as in English (?). Spanish uses an inverted question mark at the beginning of a question as well as the normal question mark at the end.
Originally, Sanskrit had no punctuation. In the 1600s, Sanskrit and Marathi, both written in the Devanagari script, started using the vertical bar (|) to end a line of prose and double vertical bars (||) in verse.
Texts in Chinese, Japanese and Korean were left unpunctuated until the modern era. In unpunctuated texts, the grammatical structure of sentences in classical writing is inferred from context. Most punctuation marks in modern Chinese, Japanese and Korean have similar functions to their English counterparts; however, they often look different and have different customary rules.
An international patent application was filed, and published in 1992 under WO number WO9219458, for two new punctuation marks: the "question comma" and the "exclamation comma." The patent application entered into national phase exclusively with Canada, advertised as lapsing in Australia on 27 January 1994 and in Canada on 6 November 1995.
Russian designer Artemy Lebedev suggested a double-comma sign, which he believes would communicate a pause better than the semicolon does. Lebedev, however, seems unaware of the widespread use of semicolon in English (in Russian, independent clauses can be separated by commas; as a result, the semicolon is used — infrequently — only for stylistic purposes).
Kinds of punctuation.
Punctuation is the art of dividing
a written composition into sentences, or parts of sentences, by points
or stops, for the purpose of marking the different pauses which the
sense, and an accurate pronunciation require.
The Comma represents the shortest pause; the Semicolon, a pause double
that of the comma; the Colon, double that of the semicolon; and a period,
double that of the colon.
The precise quantity or duration of each pause, cannot be defined; for
it varies with the time of the whole. The same composition may be rehearsed
in a quicker or a slower time; but the proportion between the pauses
should be ever invariable.
(English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners,
1795)
Under Murray's scheme, it appears, a well-placed period might give readers enough time to pause for a snack.
Punctuation is the art of dividing
written discourse into sections by means of points,
for the purpose of showing the grammatical connection and dependence,
and of making the sense more obvious. . . .
It is sometimes stated in works on Rhetoric and Grammar, that the points
are for the purpose of elocution, and directions are given to pupils
to pause a certain time at each of the stops. It is true that a pause
required for elocutionary purposes does sometimes coincide with a grammatical
point, and so the one aids the other. Yet it should not be forgotten
that the first and main ends of the points is to mark grammatical divisions.
Good elocution often requires a pause where there is no break whatever
in the grammatical continuity, and where the insertion of a point would
make nonsense.
(John Seely Hart, A Manual of Composition and Rhetoric, 1892)
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