Period drama: Check out punctuation marks lost to time

For thousands of years, the written word contained no indications of pauses, clauses or breaks. Then came the curls and squiggles. See how these evolved.

From the ancient scrolls that sit in the great 3rd Century BCE libraries of Alexandria to today’s digital web of tweets and blogs, the ghosts of punctuations past chart the evolution of the way we communicate. Take a look at characters that have faded away from modern printed works and the fascinating history behind them.

The Tironian et as used in the 10th-century work Grammaticus by the English grammarian Ælfric. (Wikimedia Commons)

Pilcrow (¶) :

The Pilcrow was not always the ‘reverse-P’ as we know it today. Its first appearances on the margins of fat paragraphs of text, was that of a simple, horizontal line. It was placed to denote a change in concept in an otherwise indecipherable mass of words. It marked the beginning paragraphs, but by the millennium , it had varying appearances. From ‘k’ (to denote Kaput, the Latin word for head), then the Roman ‘C’, in the 12th Century, and finally to the modern reverse-P shape. With the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, hand-drawn marks such as the pilcrow fell out of favour, and were lost in the mainstream. They were instead replaced by line breaks or blank spaces to divide paragraphs. In fact, readers soon grew more accustomed to blank spaces to differentiate between paragraphs.

How the Pilcrow has evolved over time. (Wikimedia Commons)

Manicule (+):

First recorded in the Domesday Book dated to 1086, the manicule (derived from the Latin word, maniculum which translated to little hand), pointed out interesting or important points or concepts to the readers within a body of text. Known to be a favourite of Renaissance writers, it would be inked to the margins to ‘bookmark’ a particular point. Alternatives like arrows and numbered footnotes, took over its job by the 19th century. It still appears on the returned-to-sender stamps of the United States Postal Service.

Tironian et (7):

In its two thousand odd-year existence, the ampersand (&) was always up against the 7-shaped Tironian et which stood for ‘and’. Created by Tiro, secretary to first century BCE orator Marcus Tullius Cicero as a part of his shorthand system, it lost popularity during the medieval times when some superstitious writers associated it with pagan symbols. Ultimately, the ampersand won the race and is still widely used today.

Diple (>):

Aristarchus, head librarian at the historical Library of Alexandria, regarded as the inventor of punctuation, also devised the Diple. Much like the manicule, the symbol > was meant to mark something of interest, usually in the margins. Centuries after its creation, Christian writers used the symbol to distinguish biblical quotations. With the advent of the printing press, it too fell out of use.

Interrobang (‽):

In 1962, an advertising executive Martin K Speckter felt the intense need to differentiate an excited or rhetorical question from a normal question. It was a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point, referred to as the ‘bang’ by printers of the time.

By 1967, the interrobang had found its way into a new font called Americana, and a year later, it made its debut on the typewriter keyboard, but it did not make it into the mainstream. Some argued that it looked unwieldy when compared to the more traditional combination of ?!, others argued that it was never meant to be a standard punctuation mark. It also emerged when computers were beginning to replace typewriters.