Punctuation, at least in English, is a lot newer than the language itself — even newer than the written form of the language. After all, the model for languages in Europe was Latin, which used hardly any punctuation. One mark that was used in classical Latin was the “capitulum” — the chapter marker. That one is still around in English, although it’s more of a typesetting mark than everyday punctuation, and now it’s called a “pilcrow.” It looks like this: ❡. In the middle ages the pilcrow was used in the multi-step process of creating manuscripts.
To create a manuscript, the first step was for a scribe to write the original text, or at least most of it. Next the manuscript was “rubricated” by the “rubricators.” “Rubrication” sounds fancier than it actually is; really it’s just adding text in red ink. It comes from the Latin word “rubrico” (to make something red).
Because the rubricated text was generally used to indicate the transition from one section to another, the word “rubric” came to be used to mean a heading or title — or even an area of study. “Rubric” is still in use today, although the “printed in red” aspect has been largely forgotten. But back to the pilcrow — which was a symbol used in rubrication to indicate a new topic or train of thought. The word “pilcrow” came from the Middle English word “pylcrafte,” which was one of two words derived from the Old French word “pelagraphe” — the other is “paragraph.”
Another punctuation mark used in classical Latin was an ivy leaf, which indicated the end of a text. Nobody knows why they used an ivy leaf, but they called it a “hedera,” because “hedera” is the Latin word for ivy. In fact the scientific name for ivy today is “hedera helix,” with the “helix” referring to the spiral pattern of its stems as they grow. Another “hedera,” though, is, like the pilcrow, still in use in typography. The hedera looks like this: ❧. Nowadays it doesn’t really have any typographical function, but it’s sometimes used as a decorative element, and it’s also known as a “fleuron”, from the French word for flower.
Once punctuation showed up, of course, starting in the 1600s, the whole category kept expanding. Nowadays the list of punctuation marks is longer than the English alphabet, and includes a an odd mix of marks with obscure names like “guillemets” ( ‹ › « » ), “solidus” ( / ), and “komejirushi” ( ※ ) along with the very pedestrian “vertical bar” and “backslash.”
Mathematical symbols began to appear at about the same time, and mostly have boring names like “plus” and “minus.” However, the sign used for division (÷) is called the “obelus.” When used strictly for math, of course, it’s just called “divided by” or something, but it started out as a mark in the creation of manuscripts to indicate passages that were doubtful or superfluous. The name “obelus” comes from the Greek word “obelos,” which means “pointed pillar”.
Punctuation continues to expand — one relatively new mark is the “interrobang” ( ‽ ), a combination of an exclamation mark (known as a “bang” in typesetting and computer programming), and a question mark, which is also known as an “interrogative.” Martin Speckter dreamed up the interrobang in 1962 and proposed it in the magazine “TYPEtalks.” He didn’t come up with the name right away though; he asked readers for suggestions, and chose “interrobang” over alternatives like “exclamaquest,” “exclarotive,” “rhet,” and, in an early-sixties application of camel-case capitalization, “QuizDing.”
All of these obscure punctuation marks are easily visible here thanks to Unicode, the computer-based system for assigning numerical values to text. Older computer systems, for example “ASCII”, from the 1960s, allowed for only relatively few characters (128 in the first edition in 1963), but this pretty quickly turned out to be nowhere near enough. Unicode, though, has more space: 137,439 characters, which is enough to include 146 scripts (alphabets), obscure punctuation and typesetting marks, and, of course, emoji 😀.
