A Brief History Of Punctuation

Classical Greek and Latin writing didn’t use punctuation at all, or even spaces between words; that sort of thing was left to the person who’d be speaking the text. St. Isidore of Seville systematized punctuation in the seventh century, but there were only three marks. “Over the following centuries, the existing punctuation marks became increasingly differentiated in order to prevent confusion. At the same time, new marks such as the question mark … arise when a lack of clarity needs to be redressed, communication controlled and sense disambiguated, an emergency perhaps stemming from greater reliance on written diplomacy as well as the newly fashionable art of letter writing.” – History Today