Miscellany № 65: from gnomonology to palaeography

Palaeography is the study of old writing. And as often as I’ve had to hunt through old manuscripts for points (·), pilcrows (¶), virgules (/) and the like, I am not a palaeographer in anything more than the loosest sense. Given this, was a pleasant surprise to find myself chairing a session at a palaeography conference called DigiPal V, held at King’s College London just a couple of weeks ago. I was there at the invitation of Stewart Brookes, King’s College’s resident digital palaeography specialist, who kindly moved me sideways from presenter to chair when I pleaded an inability to come up with a decent paper in time.

You may remember Stewart’s name from my report on Punctuation in Practice, Elizabeth Bonapfel’s workshop on punctuation in all its forms, held a few months ago at Berlin’s Freie Universität. Stewart gave a talk there about marks of punctuation in copies of the manuscripts of Ælfric, a prolific Anglo-Saxon monk who wrote hagiographies, Catholic homilies, biblical commentaries and the like — you know, the usual Anglo-Saxon–monkish sort of thing. When he isn’t studying Ælfric’s works, however, Stewart is one of the managers of the DigiPal project, a website that, in its own words,

is a new resource for the study of medieval handwriting, particularly that produced in England during the years 1000–1100, the time of Æthelred, Cnut and William the Conqueror. It is designed to allow you to see samples of handwriting from the period and to compare them with each other quickly and easily.

For you and I, this translates into a website where you can pore over medieval manuscripts in quite exquisite detail, picking out archaic letters like the thorn (‘þ’, as covered here) or long-dead marks of punctuation like the punctus versus (‘;’ or thereabouts, representing a long pause analogous to a full stop). Now I’d known about DigiPal itself for some time, but the speakers during my session and others at the DigiPal conference opened my eyes to a whole new set of online palaeography resources. Here are just a few of them:

  • The UK National Archives host an excellent online course introducing the subject of palaeography. Their material focuses on the sixteenth–nineteenth centuries, but the basic principles are the same whatever the time period.
  • Oxford University’s Ancient Lives project is a crowdsourced attempt to transcribe the thousands of ancient Greek texts found at the site of the ancient city of Oxyryhnchus in Ptolemaic Egypt. If you fancy trying your hand at palaeography, this is a great place to get started; if you like the sound of that but would prefer something a little more recent, the AnnoTate project is using the same underlying software to transcribe artists’ notebooks. Both are very cool.
  • Models of Authority, built on the same software foundations as DigiPal, lets users browse and examine Scottish law charters of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It’s as easy to use as DigiPal, and though its content is fairly limited at the moment I am reassured that there is much more to come.

There is a world of open palaeographic learning out there for the benefit of amateurs and professionals alike, and I’m looking forward to finding out much more about it. Thank you to Stewart for inviting me along — chairing a session wasn’t nearly as terrifying as I had imagined it might be, and I’m already looking forward to DigiPal VI next year!

Shady Characters at the BBC

In lieu of a post this week, head over to BBC.com’s Culture section to read my article about “The Mysterious Origins of Punctuation” — it’s hot off the presses! Want to chat about it? Post a comment here or over at the related Facebook post. Shady Characters readers will be right at home, and I hope you enjoy it!

Update: the article is now available in Spanish too, at BBC Mundo.

Miscellany № 64: let’s gnomonise

Marks of punctuation, or "gnomons", as James Brown has them in his 1845 book An English Syntithology. (Image courtesy of Coffee & Donatus.)
Marks of punctuation, or “gnomons”, as James Brown has them in his 1845 book An English Syntithology. (Many thanks to Coffee & Donatus for the image.)

Readers! Have you ever wanted a better name for “marks of punctuation”? No, me neither. And yet that is exactly what drove James Brown (no, not that one) to produce the page shown here in his rambling, esoteric An English Syntithology: In Three Books, Developing the Constructive Principles of the English Language of 1845.1

Brown, as I found out after following a link from the niche but always interesting Coffee & Donatus (tagline: “Early grammars and related matters of art and design”), was a nineteenth century grammarian from Philadelphia with a passion for cataloguing and codifying the rules of English language. His “Syntithology” was an attempt to retrofit a logical structure onto the evolutionary messiness of English grammar, and he gave it an appropriately lofty-sounding title: the Greek syn- stood for “with” or “together”; tith- was derived from tithemi, “to put”; and -ology came from logos, a “doctrine” or “principle”. He summarised his book as “the principles on which the elements are formed into the compound” — how letters form words, words makes sentences, and sentences paragraphs.*

When it came to punctuation, though Brown was happy to call the hyphen, comma and company by their conventional names (I suspect it helped that most such marks had comfortingly classical designations) he could not quite bring himself to leave the subject alone. Punctuation as a whole, he declared, was to be recast as the practice of “gnom-o-nology”.

Gnomonology. For realsies, as the kids might say.

In his chapter on the subject, Brown explained that the Greek word gnomon (“one that knows or examines”) is used to refer the pin or rod of a sundial, the part whose shadow falls upon the dial to tell an observer what time of day it is. For Brown, marks of punctuation were knowing gnomons too — “index marks”, as he described them, that pointed out something of interest in the surrounding words just like a shadow on a dial, and his new terminology was loaded with coincidence.2 The word “punctuation” comes from the Latin punctus, or “point”, for the dots of ink with which early readers marked up their unpunctuated books, though it is not a stretch to imagine these “points” as pointers in a more literal sense. And the manicule, or pointing hand (☞), a mark whose purpose was to highlight interest passages in a text, is also called the index, as Brown showed in his chart.

This drastic re-branding did not take hold. The only other reference I’ve been able to find to Brown’s concept of “gnomonology” is in an 1862 book entitled An analytical, illustrative, and constructive grammar of the English language, written by an English teacher named Brantley York some fifteen years after Brown’s Syntithology, and which lacks Brown’s missionary zeal.3 Today we punctuate our writing rather than gnomonise it, and, in hindsight, I’m just a little bit sad about that.

In tenuously related news, a colleague forwarded me a link to an article penned by the BBC’s anonymous Vocabularist that looks at the names of punctuation marks through the ages. It’s a diverting little read. Gary Nunn’s recent Guardian article “If punctuation marks were people”, errs on the fictional side. As he writes with regard to the interrobang, for example,

The interrobang is that inappropriate over-sharer we all know
They ask you at work if you got laid at the weekend‽ Or if you’re hungover again today‽

Thank you to all the readers who send in links — if you have a punctuation-related story you’d like to see here, drop me a line!

1.
Brown, James. An English Syntithology in Three Books, Developing the Constructive Principles of the English Language, by Appropriate Polymorph Terms, Used in This Science Only, and Each Having But One Meaning. Philadelphia: H. Grubb, 1847.

 ↢

2.
OED Online. “Gnomon”.

 ↢

3.
York, Brantley. An Analytical, Illustrative, and Constructive Grammar of the English Language. Raleigh: Pomeroy, 1862.

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*
Even if the latter practice is somewhat in decline. ↢

Miscellany № 63: punctuating the summer

I’ll be on holiday this coming week, enjoying the final stage of the Tour de France in Paris with my wife Leigh (as she put it when she suggested the trip: “lycra is optional, the Louvre is not”), but here are a few punctuational links to tide you over until I’m back.

  • Are you a Mancunian? The owners of an as-yet hypothetical pub called The Pilcrow are documenting their quest to build a new pub in Manchester up using local expertise and elbow grease. Follow them at their web site or on Twitter @thepilcrowpub.
  • Gunther Schmidt of lexikaliker.de sent me a link to an excellent article about Japanese punctuation. Posted at Tofugu, an educational website about Japanese language, it talks about (conceptually) familiar marks like the comma (、) and full stop (。) before moving on to more esoteric marks such as the wave dash (〜) and the unexpectedly rehabilitated interpunct (・). Koichi, the author of the piece, explains that the unusual spacing is down to the “monospaced” nature of Japanese characters, where each one occupies a roughly square area of approximately equal size, so that marks of punctuation are promoted to have the same width as letters in order to go with the typographic flow. The article is a great introduction to the subject, and I urge you to read it!
  • In the words of Mark Berman of The Washington Post: “Minnesota’s great umlaut war is over (also, Minnesota was having an umlaut war)”. Berman reports on a (quite reasonable) backlash from the inhabitants of the town of Lindström who objected to the loss of their umlaut in a recent road sign upgrade. Squint, and it’s almost a story about a diaeresis.
  • Readers with access to an academic library should take a look at Claire Bourne’s article “Dramatic Pilcrows”, published in the December 2014 issue of The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. It’s a challenging but rewarding read.

Thanks for reading! If you have a punctuation-related link of your own, why not share it here? Leave a comment on this post or drop me a line at the Contact page.

The imminent death of the paragraph

Edwin Lewis, The History of the English Paragraph (1894), page 11. (Image courtesy of archive.org.)
Edwin Lewis, The History of the English Paragraph (1894), page 11. Lewis’s PhD thesis is a pleasant enough read, though his history of the pilcrow disagrees somewhat with the accepted story described by Malcolm Parkes in Pause and Effect. (Image courtesy of archive.org.)

As I mentioned last time, I recently took part in a workshop on the subject of “punctuation in practice”. My presentation there was titled “Ghostwritten: the vanishing pilcrow”, and it traced the life of the paragraph mark from ancient marginal dash (—) to medieval capitulum (¢) to pilcrow (¶), as shown in the slide reproduced above, and finally to empty space, or paragraph indent ( ) — all things I’ve talked about here, and in the Shady Characters book, at some length.

But bear with me for a moment.

To recap, the pilcrow had lived happily in the pages of handwritten texts for centuries, added to manuscripts by specialist “rubricators” (scribes who added decorative flourishes in contrasting ink), when movable type barged its way onto the scene in the middle of the fifteenth century. This put the squeeze on the pilcrow from three distinct directions. First, typefounders never quite believed that pilcrows needed to be cast in type: when there is an entire class of worker (and there has been for centuries) whose only job is to add pilcrows, decorative capitals and their kin to the written or printed page, why bother designing, cutting, and casting those same characters and devices? Thus, the pilcrow was far less prevalent in early fonts than, say, the full stop or the semicolon. Second, the sheer volume of printed texts, peppered with double-slash (//) placeholders* indicating where pilcrows were to be added by hand, far outstripped the ability of rubricators to fill in those waiting gaps — pilcrows could not always be printed for lack of type, and they could not always be rubricated for lack of time. This all led to the third nail in the pilcrow’s coffin: as readers got used to navigating the page by means of the gaps left by missing pilcrows, the mark itself became less and less relevant.† The pilcrow, as we have heard time and again, was killed by the arrival of printing.

The question, now, is this: is the paragraph itself destined to die just as the mark that once delineated it has disappeared from sight?

That’s the thesis behind Andy Bodle’s recent article at The Guardian, entitled “Breaking point: is the writing on the wall for the paragraph?” Ignoring, for a moment, Betteridge’s law of headlines (“any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no”), the main thrust of Bodle’s argument is that the arrival of the Internet — like movable type, a revolutionary form of information technology — is exerting a “downward pressure on paragraph length”:

Most online gurus caution against blogposts of more than 600 words; some insist that the ideal length is 200. Internet users, they cry, can’t be bothered to scroll through long articles. Last year, the bosses at Associated Press circulated a memo stipulating that stories be between 300 and 500 words long (exceptions can be made — up to a whopping 700 words — for events of global importance). At the same time, the UK government’s website, gov.uk, promised that it would never publish a sentence exceeding 25 words. […] Reading on a laptop screen or phone is slower and more fatiguing, and it’s harder to keep your place; inserting regular, clear breaks (complete lines rather than indentations) is one way to create a smoother reading experience.

Bodle also makes the point that newspapers, where narrow columns reward frequent indentation, and news media in general, where an objective viewpoint is prized above all, discourage long, discursive paragraphs. Certainly, having picked the current headline story from Reuters (“Euro zone summit aims to keep Greece in single currency”), I count only twenty-five sentences in twenty-four paragraphs (did the writer forget to press “return” after one particular sentence, I wonder?). And this is not, to my eye, an isolated incident. The BBC, writing on the same subject, is little better, and it is just one of the many news outlets that seem to have adopted an atomic approach to paragraphing.

Technological advances, then, carry both opportunities and dangers for the written word. Printing edged out the pilcrow; the typewriter did a number on the em and en dashes and many other uncommon marks; the Internet, in turn, is doing its damndest to kill the paragraph. I’ve lost count of the number of blogs and other websites that treat sentences and paragraphs as interchangeable units of sense and whose staccato delivery is often accompanied by the demarcation of paragraphs by blank lines rather than paragraph indents.

And yet, as disconcerting as I find these changes, I’m doing my best to stay as open-minded as I can about them. Every component of the way we communicate via the written word — our letters, the marks and spaces between them, their arrangement on the page — is and has always been subject to change under pressure of convention, technology, and fashion. Maybe the pulverisation of the paragraph is nothing more than a stylistic tic adopted by writers who need to broaden their reading horizons beyond news websites, or perhaps it’s a deeper trend, an inexorable product of the tiny screens on which we communicate with the world. I honestly don’t know, but I’ll be intrigued to see how the paragraph weathers this next great shift in writing technology.

What are your experiences? Have any writers among you come under any pressure to atomise your paragraphs, or to otherwise restructure your writing for the web?

*
The “//” mark was a holdover from a twelfth-century system of punctuation that included only horizontal and sloping dashes. See Shady Characters, the book, for more details. ↢
†
Thanks again to Claire M. L. Bourne, whose article, “Dramatic Pilcrows”, helped me distil the factors behind the demise of the pilcrow into a coherent story. ↢