

The mysterious origins of punctuation - scdoshi
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150902-the-mysterious-origins-of-punctuation

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jerf
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.)

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xinyhn
Any more information on this? Honestly something that I have never considered
before.

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gmfawcett
A counterpoint to the claim about the ancients reading aloud:
[http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/29/featuresreviews...](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/29/featuresreviews.guardianreview27)

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peter303
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.

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nxb
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.

~~~
kbenson
That's interesting. In English we would probably consider constant pitch and
meter to be dull. Then again, I remember from Latin in college that the romans
tended to play with sentence structure to put the subject at the end of the
sentence, making it more suspenseful, so there are probably other language
attributes that those more homogenous populations play with to introduce
variety and distinguish interesting and dull speakers.

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JadeNB
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](http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk) .

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vfdfv
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.

~~~
nxb
Also worth pointing out that in languages which do divide the words, they
often divide the words too much, such that the individual words have little to
no relation to the meaning of the longer phrase. E.g. new york, arm and a leg,
kick the bucket.

This, over-dividing problem, along with the under-dividing problem you
mentioned, are both huge hurdles for machine textual understanding and machine
translation systems.

On the information-extraction system I'm working on now, roughly 80% of the
entities we're trying to extract are multi-word expressions. Very difficult.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiword_expression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiword_expression)

[2]
[http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Multiword_Expressi...](http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Multiword_Expressions)

[3]
[http://lingo.stanford.edu/pubs/WP-2001-03.pdf](http://lingo.stanford.edu/pubs/WP-2001-03.pdf)

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resu_nimda
Is it actually described as "over-dividing" in an academic sense? Those
individual words do have meaning, but they have later been recombined into
forms that have new, sometimes orthogonal meanings. I can see the argument for
mashing them back together in that case, but "over-divided" seems a strange
way to look at it.

~~~
vfdfv
A related idea is linguistic "compositionality"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_compositionality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_compositionality)

I don't have hard numbers, but I know from experience that a large share of
multiword expressions are non-compositional (the meaning of the larger phrase
can't be inferred from its constituents), so in that case thinking of them as
"over-divided" makes sense to me.

~~~
Nadya
In linguistics, we call such phrases "idioms".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom)

