Making a Point Page 2
Augustine puzzles over why Ambrose was doing this – not even using the muffled voice that someone would typically use when alone:
Perhaps he was afraid that, if he read aloud, some obscure passage in the author he was reading might raise a question in the mind of an attentive listener, and he would have to explain the meaning or even discuss some of the more difficult points. If he spent time in this way, he would not manage to read as much as he wished. Perhaps a more likely reason why he read to himself was that he needed to spare his voice, which quite easily became hoarse. But whatever his reason, we may be sure it was a good one.
Translation by R S Pine-Coffin from Saint Augustine: Confessions
(Penguin Classics, 1961).
2
… was diversity
Diverse punctuation practice is inevitable when there are several ways of marking the same thing. Inserting spaces is one way of separating words, but there are others. Here’s a selection:
thisisnotanexampleofwordseparation
this is an example of word separation
this.is.an.example.of.word.separation
this+is+an+example+of+word+separation
thiSiSaNexamplEoFworDseparatioN
ThisIsAnExampleOfWordSeparation
this-is-an-example-of-word-separation
The last two are ways around the domain-name problem mentioned at the end of the previous chapter. If we can’t use spaces to make it easier to read the words in an Internet address, then we can use hyphens or the curiously but aptly named ‘camel case’ (as in the two examples showing a mix of upper-case and lower-case letters).
In Anglo-Saxon times, we see a similar diversity, reflecting an earlier variability that was present among the writers of ancient Rome. People experimented with word division. Some inscriptions have the words separated by a circle (as with the Undley bracteate) or a raised dot. Some use small crosses. Gradually we see spaces coming in, but often in a very irregular way, with some words spaced and others not – what is sometimes called an ‘aerated’ script. Even in the eleventh century, less than half the inscriptions in England had all the words separated.
The slow arrival of word division in inscriptions isn’t so surprising when we consider their character. The texts that identify jewels, boxes, statues, buildings, swords, and so on are typically short and often predictable. If people know their church is called ‘St Ambrose’, then they will read its name (if they are able to read) regardless of how it is spaced. Nobody would interpret STAMBROSE as STAM + BROSE. Also, the physical environment makes punctuation unnecessary. If the aim of a full stop is to tell readers that a sentence has come to an end, then the boundary of a physical object will do that just as well. It’s no different today. We don’t need a full stop at the end of a sign saying WAY OUT. The right-hand edge of the sign is enough to show us that the message is finished.
If they are able to read … In Anglo-Saxon times, most people couldn’t. Only a tiny elite of monks, scribes, and other professionals knew how to write; so there was no popular expectation that inscriptions should be easy to read. Nor was there any peer-group pressure among inscribers. In a monastery, there would be a scribal tradition to be followed and a strict hierarchy, with junior scribes copying the manuscript practices of their seniors. By contrast, the sculptor or goldsmith producing an inscription would be someone working alone, with no guidance other than his own sense of tradition and aesthetic taste. Divergent punctuation practices were an inevitable result.
We see a similar diversity when we read the earliest surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts – the meagre collection of glossaries, charters, wills, name-lists, poems, riddles, and religious texts from the seventh and eighth centuries that give us our first real sense of what Old English was like. Manuscripts, of course, are very different from inscriptions, as they contain sentences of varying complexity extending over several pages. They can also be revised and corrected, either by the original scribe or by later readers. But these early texts have one thing in common: unlike the inscriptions, they all display word-spaces.
By the seventh century in England, word-spacing had become standard practice, reflecting a radical change that had taken place in reading habits. Silent reading was now the norm. Written texts were being seen not as aids to reading aloud, but as self-contained entities, to be used as a separate source of information and reflection from whatever could be gained from listening and speaking. It is the beginning of a view of language, widely recognized today, in which writing and speech are seen as distinct mediums of expression, with different communicative aims and using different processes of composition. And this view is apparent in the efforts scribes made to make the task of reading easier, with the role of spacing and other methods of punctuation becoming increasingly appreciated.
In some cases, the nature of the genre made word-spacing inevitable. The earliest English manuscripts are alphabetical glossaries containing lists of Latin words with their English equivalents – essential aids for the many monks who were having to learn Latin as a foreign language. But imagine a glossary with no word-spaces! The different entries would run into each other and the whole thing would become unusable. Bilingual glossaries – as modern bilingual dictionaries – need good layout for readers to find their way about.
Word-spaces are inevitable, also, when glossing a continuous text. There’s a copy of the Book of Psalms dating from around 825, known as the Vespasian Psalter. It’s in Latin, with the words spaced, but someone has added word-by-word English translations – over 30,000 of them – above the Latin words in the space between the lines. Each gloss is easily visible, at a distance from its neighbours. Once again, the layout dictates the spacing.
What happens in genres where the text is a series of sentences, rather than a series of isolated words? Here too we see word-spacing, but the situation is more complex. Very often, some spaces are larger than others, probably reflecting a scribe’s sense of the way words relate in meaning to each other. A major sense-break might have a larger space. Words that belong closely together might have a small one. It’s difficult to show this in modern print, where word-spaces tend to be the same width, but scribes often seemed to think like this:
we bought a cup of tea in the cafe
The ‘little’ words, such as prepositions, pronouns, and the definite article, are felt to ‘belong’ to the following content words. Indeed, so close is this sense of binding that many scribes echo earlier practice and show them with no separation at all. Here’s a transcription of two lines from one of Ælfric’s sermons, dated around 990.
þærwæronðagesewene twegenenglas onhwitumgrelū;
þær wæron ða gesewene twegen englas on hwitum grelū;
‘there were then seen two angels in white garments’
Eacswilc onhisacennednsse wæronenglasgesewene’.
Eacswilc on his acennednsse wæron englas gesewene’.
‘similarly at his birth were angels seen’
Lines from the manuscript of Ælfric’s sermon ‘In ascensione domini’, British Library, Royal MS 7 C.xii, f.105r. The handwriting is Anglo-Saxon minuscule in its square phase, c.990.
The word-strings, separated by spaces, reflect the grammatical structure and units of sense within the sentence. And a careful examination of the original text shows an even more subtle feature. Normally the letter e is written much as we do today, as in the first two e’s in acennednsse; but when the e appears before the space, its middle stroke is elongated, acting as a bridge between the two word-strings. It’s an early kind of letter-joining, or ligature.
The Ælfric sermon is quite late, for an Anglo-Saxon text, but its use of word-strings and variable word-spaces is typical of the time, and the practice continues until the very end of the Old English period. The extract also shows the presence of other forms of punctuation (which I’ll discuss in the next chapter). Taken together, even in just two lines of text it’s possible to sense that there has been a major change in orthographic behaviour
compared with the unspaced, punctuationless writing seen in the English inscriptions and in traditional Latin.
The origins of the change are not simply to do with the development of new habits of reading. They are bound up with the emergence of Christianity in the West, and the influential views of writers such as St Augustine. Book 3 of his (Latin) work On Christian Doctrine, published at the end of the fourth century AD, is entitled: ‘On interpretation required by the ambiguity of signs’, and in its second chapter we are given a ‘rule for removing ambiguity by attending to punctuation’. Augustine gives a series of Latin examples where the placing of a punctuation mark in an unpunctuated text makes all the difference between two meanings. The examples are of the kind used today when people want to draw attention to the importance of punctuation, as in the now infamous example of the panda who eats, shoots and leaves vs eats shoots and leaves. But for Augustine, this is no joke, as the location of a mark can distinguish important points of theological interpretation, and in the worst case can make all the difference between orthodoxy and heresy.
A sacred text has a hugely privileged position within a society. Great care needs to be taken to protect its identity, to ensure that it is transmitted accurately from generation to generation. At the same time, all sacred texts need to be interpreted and edited, so that their meaning will come across clearly and effectively to readers. The intervention takes a variety of forms. The impulse to make the work beautiful leads to decoration, with sometimes whole pages devoted to a single word or letter, as in the magnificently illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels. The impulse to teach leads to the addition of notes and commentary. And the impulse to clarify leads to the highlighting of individual words, names, or sentences, the marking of chapters and verses – and the insertion of punctuation marks.
Augustine argues that punctuation has a critical role to play in enabling readers to arrive at a correct interpretation of scripture, and he proposes two rules of thumb. The first and most important rule is to allow what we know about the world (the world of Christian faith, in his case) to influence our decision about where to place a punctuation mark. The second is to carefully examine the context in which a particular sentence is used, as this can clarify its meaning and suggest how a punctuation mark might help. But he is aware that these principles don’t solve all problems of ambiguity in writing. He concludes:
Where, however, the ambiguity cannot be cleared up, either by the rule of faith or by the context, there is nothing to hinder us to point the sentence according to any method we choose of those that suggest themselves.
Any method we choose. This personal decision-making lies at the very heart of punctuation, and becomes a recurrent theme over the next 1600 years.
3
To point, or not to point?
Word-spacing is an important first step in making a text easier to read, but it doesn’t take us very far, once sentences become long and complex, and a written discourse starts to grow. Readers then need help. But the earliest texts from antiquity gave precious little guidance about how they were to be read.
Manuscripts did usually show the major divisions of a work, such as chapters or paragraphs. The beginning of a new section might be identified by a large (sometimes coloured or decorated) letter, or by indenting the first line, or by outdenting it – having it start in the left-hand margin. A mark in the shape of an ivy-leaf (or hedera) might indicate the beginning of a piece of commentary, distinguishing it from the preceding main text. Quite a lot of use was made of a special > mark in the margin to mark a quotation or a paragraph opening – it was called a diple, from the Greek word for ‘double’, referring to the two lines in the character. Apart from marks showing these major structural locations, blocks of writing were unpunctuated. There might be the occasional pause shown within a paragraph. Nothing more.
Punctuation, in short, was as much the job of the reader as the writer. An impulse to punctuate comes when readers encounter a piece of writing that is ambiguous or unclear, or where the provided punctuation is insufficient for their needs. If the writers haven’t done enough, then readers feel they have to do something about it. Old manuscripts often show readers adding marks to a text to help their understanding. Sometimes readers have disagreed about what to do, and we see marks crossed out or replaced.
It’s no different today. Even with the highly punctuated texts of modern print, we often find ourselves needing to add extra marks. People look at a text they need to speak aloud, such as a lecture, speech, or script, and mark places to pause, or underline words they want to emphasize. Actors might add arrows to show the voice rising and falling, or other features resembling musical notation. Newsreaders mark places where they need to be careful of a particular pronunciation, such as not adding an r in the phrase law and order. When people have to engage seriously with a text, as when studying or preparing for a business meeting, they underline, put marks in the margin, or highlight passages in bright colours to identify the bits they think are important.
Over the centuries, writers gradually came to realize that, if they wanted their meaning to come across clearly, they couldn’t leave the task to their readers. And this was aided by the change in reading habits I referred to in the previous chapter. It’s difficult to see how punctuation could have developed in a graphic world where scriptura continua was the norm. If there are no word-spaces, there’s no room to insert marks. Writers or readers might be able to insert the occasional dot or simple stroke, to show where the sense changed, but it would be impossible to develop a sophisticated system that would keep pace with the complex narratives and reflections being expressed in such domains as poetry, chronicles, and sermons. However, once word-spaces became the norm, new punctuational possibilities were available.
It nonetheless took a while for a punctuation system to develop in England. The first missionaries, copying word-spaced manuscripts in their monastery scriptoria, evidently didn’t feel the need for it. Their Latin was good, they knew the texts well, and their focus was on spiritual practices, so they didn’t need the extra help that punctuation might provide. In any case, many authors thought it was the job of readers to discover the meaning of scripture for themselves, not for writers to ‘dictate’ how it should be interpreted by adding marks to the page. Punctuation was never going to be a priority in such a climate.
But times changed. Later generations of monks often had a poor knowledge of Latin, and became increasingly dependent on glosses into English. Literacy ability varied greatly. Bede, in a letter to Eusebius, abbot at Jarrow, in 716, complains about how he has had to edit his commentary on St John’s Apocalypse in a certain way to take account of ‘indolence’ in his readers. By the time of King Alfred the Great, at the end of the ninth century, the combined effect of political turmoil, Viking invasions, and general intellectual apathy had led to the virtual disappearance of sophisticated literacy. In one of his writings – the preface to the English translation of St Gregory’s Cura Pastoralis (‘Pastoral Care’) – Alfred contrasts the early days of Christianity in England with his own time, and bemoans the way learning has been lost:
So completely had it declined in England that there were very few people on this side of the Humber who could understand their service-books in English or translate even one written message from Latin into English, and I think there were not many beyond the Humber either. So few they were that I cannot think of even a single one south of the Thames when I came to the throne.
He resolves to do something about it, initiating a programme of translation into English, and encouraging the learning of Latin.
It’s a crucial turning-point. Suddenly, longer and more varied works begin to be written down in English, and to reach more people. Different styles emerge, both within poetry and prose. In poetry, we encounter long heroic narratives such as Beowulf alongside spiritual reflections such as The Dream of the Rood – early texts surviving in late manuscripts. In prose, we find political and legal texts such as laws, charters,
and wills; religious texts such as prayers, homilies, and Bible translations; scientific texts dealing with medicine, botany, and folklore; and historical texts such as town records, lists of rulers, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. There is much more to read, and many more people who want to read it. We are still centuries away from a world of reference where daily engagement with multiple texts is routine, where rapid and easy reading is essential, and where there is pressure on writers to express themselves clearly and effectively – ‘in plain English’, as it is often put. But the linguistic factors that enable us to be fluent literacy multi-taskers today can be traced back to the decisions made by writers a millennium ago. A stable orthography is one of these factors, and punctuation is the backbone of orthography.
The punctuation marks we see in Old English manuscripts vary a great deal, depending on the handwriting style used, and they are often idiosyncratic; but certain general features can be observed. There was clearly a sense that words were important units of text. They are important not only in learning one’s mother-tongue (‘how many words do you know?’) but in learning another language (‘what’s the word for …?’). In a world where two languages work together with different functions – as Latin and English did in Anglo-Saxon times – the ability to identify and process words easily and quickly is paramount. Individual words come to the fore in inscriptions, glossaries, lists of names, year-dates, and many other contexts. And in longer texts we see word-spaces supplemented by new signs to help readers identify where a word starts or where it ends.
Sometimes simple pointing suffices, as if we were to write:
this·is·an·example·of·middle·dots