“Semicolon usage in British English books has fallen by nearly 50% in the past two decades,” a report by the language-learning website Babbel proclaimed in May.
Their findings had the desired effect. Websites and newspapers carried opinion pieces linking back to their findings. YouTubers made videos. The grammatically inclined posted on social media, and one assumes Babbel sat back satisfied with the results.
Some writers love the semicolon; others hate it. In recent years, the haters have predominated. It is
“Semicolon usage in British English books has fallen by nearly 50% in the past two decades,” a report by the language-learning website Babbel proclaimed in May.
Their findings had the desired effect. Websites and newspapers carried opinion pieces linking back to their findings. YouTubers made videos. The grammatically inclined posted on social media, and one assumes Babbel sat back satisfied with the results.
Some writers love the semicolon; others hate it. In recent years, the haters have predominated. It is often easier to read and write two separate sentences than it is to write one sentence with two independent clauses separated by a correctly placed semicolon. Yet there are those who believe its elegance justifies this additional effort. It is entirely possible that the number of such people is falling…
Punctuation evolves over time.
In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken, and it remained spoken for millennia. Then writing came along. The earliest written scripts appear only c. 3000 BCE.
By the time the Epic of Gilgamesh was composed in Ancient Mesopotamia, most likely c. 2000 BCE the first punctuation marks had made their appearance, but they weren’t punctuation marks in the way we understand them today. They were paralinguistic; that is, they worked to convey meaning beyond the words used. They signalled pauses, long and short.
In Sanskrit, the earliest non-alphabetical marks, the anudatta and svarita, were instructions on intonation. Even by the 5th century BCE, Panini’s seminal grammar did not deal with punctuation. The danda, the horizontal line that signals the end of a sentence, and the double danda, which marks the end of a section, came much later.
In the West, early written text was not broken up into words and sentences; there were a continuous series of letters. The Romans had a name for it: scriptura continua.
The main use of text was as an aid to public speakers. Orators would add their own marks to help them deliver their speeches or tell their stories more effectively. Not all of them approved of this practice, though. The Roman statesman Cicero sneered at the use of punctuation of any kind, saying a good speaker should know when to pause and what to emphasise, without any help.
Amid the spread of Christianity, the oral tradition continued to flourish. Literacy was largely confined to monasteries, and some elites. As recently as 1000 BCE, even royalty and nobility in the West were often illiterate, surrounding themselves with clerics and scribes to handle written matters.
***
It was in the early Christian monasteries that the foundations of modern punctuation were laid.
Reading aloud from the Bible was an important part of monastery routine. In the 6th century CE, the influential Italian monk Benedict, who founded the Benedictine order (and was later canonised), laid down a set of rules for how such reading was to be done. One of these rules was: “If anyone whilst he reciteth... maketh a mistake, and doth not humble himself there before all by making satisfaction, let him undergo a greater punishment.”
As the rules gained importance, not just among Benedictines but across Christian monastic orders, making a mistake while reading became so frowned-upon, it could attract a penalty of severe fasting or even whipping as expiation.
Ascetic readers developed their own marks to help them pause in the right places, and pause for the right durations. The scholar and monk Alcuin from York, working in the court of Charlemagne in the 8th century, had specific instructions for scribes too: “Let them put those relevant marks of punctuation in their proper order, so that the lector may neither read mistakenly, nor by chance suddenly fall silent before the holy brothers in church.”
What were these notations? Some used forward slashes, others used a cluster of three dots. Some used a system developed by the Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes: a dot on the baseline marked a short pause, a dot at mid-level marked the end of a clause, a high dot served as a full stop.
Still others used an acute accent on top of a diastole, something a lot like the modern semi-colon (with a similar function too).
***
The next revolution in punctuation occurred several centuries later, with the German Johannes Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press, invented around 1440 printing standardised punctuation, although it took a while.
The semicolon only makes its first appearance in print in 1496. It appears nearly 30 years before the comma, which made its first appearance in its present form, replacing the earlier forward slash, in 1521. People called it the hemi colon, the comma colon, and the sub colon, before settling on its current name.
The 16th century also saw the arrival of the apostrophe, colon, full stop and point of interrogation (it would be two centuries until people called it the question mark), as well as the point of exclamation and the quotation quadrats (or, quotation mark).
“During the 1500s, we see writer after writer trying to impose order on a very messy situation. Most agree that the three main marks reflect three degrees of pause,” British linguist David Crystal writes, in his history of English punctuation, Making a Point (2015).
Crystal goes on to quote from a guide released in 1589, which recognised a comma as the shortest pause, a colon as “twice as much time”, and a period as a “full pause”.
The formula was set: one period = two colons = four commas.
***
Enter Shakespeare and his fellow Elizabethan playwrights.
For them, punctuation was a tool to help actors perform. Ben Jonson was fastidious about punctuation, and he knew who to blame: “negligence of writers and printers”.
That fastidiousness persisted all the way to the 20th century.
In her bestselling book Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (2003), Lynne Truss offers an exploration of how punctuation, as we now use it, vastly alters meaning.
She also tells a story about the playwright George Bernard Shaw. When actor Ralph Richardson tried to put a personal spin on his role as Captain Bluntschli in the three-act comedy Arms and the Man, “Shaw stopped him at once and told him to forget the naturalism and observe the punctuation instead”.
In an era of Instagram, YouTube and personal spins on everything, few remain sticklers for punctuation. Indeed, they serve new functions altogether, as emoticons, in email IDs and urls.
Meanwhile, even as authors, journalists, critics and editors give the semicolon the cold shoulder, one group of people never will. And this group produces more writing than all the authors in the world: programmers.
In the world of programming, the semicolon is a statement terminator, the equivalent of a full stop. A 2023 analysis by the software company Cycode estimated that the 13 million professional developers worldwide each write about 14,000 lines of code a year. This amounts to an annual total of about 18.7 billion lines of code.
As Mark Twain, another punctuation fanatic, might have put it: Reports of the semicolon’s demise are greatly exaggerated.
(K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and, occasionally, technology)
One Subscription.
Get 360° coverage—from daily headlines
to 100 year archives.
Archives
HT App & Website