The mysterious origins of punctuation

Sometimes the movies like to use $SCIENCE to bring forward someone from the past and see our world and be all surprised and stuff. It was almost its own genre in the 1980s. And they were always amazed at radios and cars and all the obvious things. But I also find it interesting at all the other things that they would find amazing and we don't even notice or know about, and as the article says, the sight of someone sitting on a park bench, reading a book, and their lips not moving would surprise quite a lot of our ancestors, to say nothing of a "normal person" doing it rather than a highly educated priest or obvious academic. We take it for granted, but as the article says, it's a relatively recent innovation. (On the timescale of "all of human civilization", anyhow.)

When I learned modern Chinese, it had only sentence breaks. Individual words are one to four syllables and not separated. It takes a while to handle this. This would be like eliminating spaces in English. Chinese before 1900 is even worse. They didnt have sentence and paragraph breaks, leaving one large grid of characters. And the grid can go in any of four directions: vertical horizontal, rightwise, leftwise. Ancient Latin and Torahanic Hebrew is like this too.

So punctuation is a type of musical notation for high-level meter and pitch, while the words are like the lower-level rhythm. Pitch and meter fluctuations, over the ranges of phrases and sentences, are what many spoken languages use to chunk sentences and phrases, which helps listeners disambiguate the connective structure of the words.

Quite interesting that punctuation co-evolved with musical notations. I had thought that punctuation existed prior to musical notation.

Side note: although American English speakers employ quite diverse pitch and meter patterns, e.g. more homogenous populations, as in many European countries, have extremely consistent spoken pitch and meter usage patterns over phrases and sentences.

This appears to be a lightly summarised excerpt of Houston's (fascinating) book "Shady Characters". As mentioned briefly at the end of the article, he has an interesting blog where he discusses more: http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk .

It's worth pointing out that the scripts of many widely spoken languages do not have a word divider (e.g. the space character in English). Mandarin, Japanese, and Khmer are some examples.

I'm aware of some studies that try to determine whether or not this slows down reading, but in my own experience it doesn't get in the way much.