Re: CONLANG Digest - 4 Jul 2001 to 5 Jul 2001 (#2001-187)

Samuel Rivier wrote:

> Latin actually formerly lacked lower case but did use
> punctuation. So David Peterson you were backwards
> there. Lower case was added in the 13th century if I'm
> not mistaken. It may have been the 11th or 10th,
> actually. I'll have to check.
Well, originally it had neither, but it depends on what period
you're talking about.   Miniscule (aka lower-case) was
developed by Alcuin of York, Charlemagne's chief minister
of educational reform in the late 8th century, and the Romans
did indeed have a kind of punctuation, but nothing like what
modern languages use.  Romans divided words up by individual
points, raised to the midpoint of the line, much like the Greek
colon, but did not have anything like an exclamation mark,
question mark or period to indicate intonation.  St. Jerome is
said to have invented a system of phrase-based punctuation
designed to help the reader speak texts aloud (since even at
this late time silent reading had not yet been "invented", so
closely was the association of the written word with the
spoken).  This system was however based on projecting the
first word in a phrase out into the margin (the opposite of
indenting), not with special marks.  IIRC, these marks were
invented by Medieval monks.  It is said (and I don't know if
this is to be taken as apocryphal) that the exclamation mark
was designed by taking the Latin word "io" ("joy") and placing
the "i" on top of the "o", and that this sorta morphed into the
modern day "!".  As for the period and question mark,
I don't know how they came about.

===================================
Thomas Wier <artabanos@...>

"Aspidi men Saiôn tis agalletai, hên para thamnôi
  entos amômêton kallipon ouk ethelôn;
autos d' exephugon thanatou telos: aspis ekeinê
  erretô; exautês ktêsomai ou kakiô" - Arkhilokhos