
The Birth of the Semicolon - Osiris30
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/08/01/the-birth-of-the-semicolon/#.XUPtiop5fsk.twitter
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jackschultz
If we're speaking about punctuation, there really needs to be another mark in
between a period and exclamation point, something that means what you said is
sincere.

Responding to a text by saying "Thanks." or "Thanks!" is so different. If I
was talking to someone and they gave a compliment, I'd want to say a sincere
"thanks", but there isn't a way to do that in a text that doesn't come off as
weird.

~~~
jolmg
> something that means what you said is sincere

Ideally, everything one says should be sincere, so your idea sounds weird to
me. I think I understand you want more options in the communication medium of
text since we can't have body language and voice tone here.

Personally, I just try to be consistent with my expressions. If my "Thanks."
is always used in situations where I'm "sincere" or "deeply appreciative" or
otherwise, then that's what it means from me.

There are people that express themselves with absurd amounts of exclamation
points and all sorts of hearts and blushing emojis, and I understand that they
haven't gone absolutely crazy for me because of that. I just keep tabs in the
different expressions different people have for the same things.

The meanings of expressions are determined by those who use them.

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notfashion
> Ideally, everything one says should be sincere, so your idea sounds weird to
> me.

This is an extremely characteristic HN/engineer comment.

People use irony in communication. It's part of the human repertoire. Saying
"oh great" in response to bad news, for example. The notion that ideally there
would be no irony in textual communication isn't a practical or desirable
possibility. It's in the same Zuckerbergian category as beliefs in the
transparency of communication or the sacred integrity of having a single
online identity.

The thing that really kills the "sincerity mark" is that there's no reason why
it can't be abused and lose its meaning, as has happened with the word
"literally".

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jolmg
> The thing that really kills the "sincerity mark" is that there's no reason
> why it can't be abused and lose its meaning, as has happened with the word
> "literally".

Yeah, I was thinking that too. I forgot to mention.

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bobthechef
„‚cultural rebirth’ after the gloomy Middle Ages”

Not the point of the article, but that slanderous characterization of the
Middle Ages for some reason refuses to die even centuries following the
fanaticism of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. It is well understood
that the Middle Ages were a remarkeable period, culturally speaking. The
Renaissance frankly grew out of the Middle Ages.

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king-rat
Interesting that the semicolon was born out of a need for a longer pause in
spoken language, rather than as a means to connect two independent clauses as
is taught today

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bitwize
Virtually all punctuation marks started as prosody hints, indicating
intonation and pauses, suggesting how the text is to be read aloud. In fact
you can argue that this is still the case: it was only later that we invented
grammatical structure rules for them, and even those are applied only in
certain contexts like professional writing. In casual writing, we tend fall
back to using punctuation as prosody markers, for example: "Worst. Episode.
Ever."

~~~
jessriedel
Yes, reading a transcript without punctuation can give one a visceral sense of
what drove its introduction.

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simonebrunozzi
> The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494

Again! Ten years ago I met my (now) wife in Venezia (Venice), and since then
I've become really interested in Venezia's history, inventions, etc.

It's incredible how many ideas, inventions, trends, important people are
inextricably linked with Venezia between the 14th and 17th century. It was
never a huge city, but it has been deeply influential, in a way similar to
today's concept of "alpha city" [0], but not just limited to economic
importance.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city)

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acqq
The typography on the scanned 1494 page is beautiful. I also remember seeing
the ancient Roman grave stones with the very nice letters, but I admire how
they developed the types for printing.

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benbreen
Aldus Manutius and his workshop assistants had an incredible eye for design.
Not just the typography but the layouts as well tend to be more elegant (to my
eyes) than what we have today. One of my favorite examples:
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Hypnerotomachia_...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Hypnerotomachia_Poliphili)

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k__
Is there a reason why programming languages use semicolons instead of dots as
terminators?

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drivers99
A lot of programming languages are descendants of ALGOL [1], where the ; is
the separator, not a terminator (you don't have to use it on the last
statement of a block of code).

Pascal (being based on algol) is the same, and the final "end." statement of
the program, which is the main program, has a period/full stop. See end of
this sample: [2] A begin / end block is one statement so they end like so
"end;" unless it's the last one in a procedure, in which case you don't need
the semi-colon.

C was similar, except they made ; a terminator instead of separator, but you
don't have to put it at the end of being/end blocks. C just uses { } to make
it clear. But then, in C++ I always forget to put ; at the end of a class
definition. I get why it's there, but it looks more like a function definition
to me which doesn't need a semicolon at the end.

Many languages are also from C or at least the Algol family tree (but usually
C), like C++, Java, Javascript, etc.

More about ALGOL:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL)

[1] Algol sample:
[http://sandbox.mc.edu/~bennet/cs404/doc/primes_alg.html](http://sandbox.mc.edu/~bennet/cs404/doc/primes_alg.html)

[2] Pascal sample:
[http://courses.washington.edu/css448/zander/Code/array.p](http://courses.washington.edu/css448/zander/Code/array.p)

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anbop
The author's description of the various typefaces and their semicolons is just
exquisite. What a fucking writer.

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ggg3
anyone knows what "ufq" means in the latin page?

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jfengel
It's "usq"; that's a medial S (ſ) rather than an f. It's short for "usque",
meaning "up to" or "as far as".

A rough translation of the sentence would be "The experience teaches you as
far as it can; the author can't say beyond what they've been given to speak."

