History of English, English written language

Автор работы: Пользователь скрыл имя, 18 Апреля 2011 в 10:24, доклад

Краткое описание

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.

Содержимое работы - 1 файл

творческая работа.docx

— 699.98 Кб (Скачать файл)

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 languages.

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.

Novel punctuation marks.

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.

  • Back in ancient Greece and Rome, when a speech was prepared in writing, marks were used to indicate where--and for how long--a speaker should pause. 
     
    These pauses (and eventually the marks themselves) were named after the sections they divided. The longest section was called a
    period, defined by Aristotle as "a portion of a speech that has in itself a beginning and an end." The shortest pause was a comma (literally, "that which is cut off"), and midway between the two was the colon--a "limb," "strophe," or "clause."
  • Marking the Beat 
    The three marked pauses were sometimes graded in a geometric progression, with one "beat" for a comma, two for a colon, and four for a period. As W.F. Bolton observes in A Living Language (1988), "such marks in oratorical 'scripts' began as physical necessities but needed to coincide with the 'phrasing' of the piece, the demands of emphasis, and other nuances of
    elocution."
  • Almost Pointless 
    Until the introduction of printing in the late 15th century, punctuation in English was decidedly unsystematic and at times virtually absent. Many of Chaucer's manuscripts, for instance, were punctuated with nothing more than periods at the end of verse lines, without regard for
    syntax or sense.
  • Slash and Double Slash 
    The favorite mark of England's first printer, William Caxton (1420-1491), was the forward
    slash (also known as the solidus, virgule, oblique, diagonal, and virgula suspensiva)--forerunner of the modern comma. Some writers of that era also relied on a double slash (as found today in http://) to signal a longer pause or the start of a new section of text.
  • Ben ("Two Pricks") Jonson 
    One of the first to codify the rules of punctuation in English was the playwright Ben Jonson--or rather, Ben:Jonson, who included the colon (he called it the "pause" or "two pricks") in his signature. In the final chapter of The English Grammar (1640), Jonson briefly discusses the primary functions of the comma,
    parenthesis, period, colon, question mark (the "interrogation"), and exclamation point (the "admiration").
  • Talking Points 
    In keeping with the practice (if not always the precepts) of Ben Jonson, punctuation in the 17th and 18th centuries was increasingly determined by the rules of syntax rather than the breathing patterns of speakers. Nevertheless, this passage from Lindley Murray's best-selling English Grammar (over 20 million sold) shows that even at the end of the 18th century punctuation was still treated, in part, as an oratorical aid:

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.

  • Writing Points 
    By the end of the industrious 19th century, grammarians had come to de-emphasize the
    elocutionary role of punctuation:

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)

  • Final Points 
    In our own time, the declamatory basis for punctuation has pretty much given way to the syntactic approach. Also, in keeping with a century-long trend toward shorter sentences, punctuation is now more lightly applied than it was in the days of Dickens and Emerson. 
     
    Countless style guides spell out the
    conventions for using the various marks. Yet when it comes to the finer points (regarding serial commas, for instance), sometimes even the experts disagree. 
     
    Meanwhile, fashions continue to change. In modern prose,
    dashes are in; semicolons are out. Apostrophes are either sadly neglected or tossed around like confetti, while quotation marks are seemingly dropped at random on unsuspecting words. 
     
    And so it remains true, as G. V. Carey observed decades ago, that punctuation is governed "two-thirds by rule and one-third by personal taste."

Информация о работе History of English, English written language