Punctuation was invented for reading aloud, not for grammar
For most of history, Western scribes wrote words in one unbroken stream, without spaces or sentence breaks. The earliest marks were there to help people read aloud: Greek playwrights flagged where actors should pause. It took Irish monks, Bible copyists and eventually printing presses to turn those breathing cues into the commas and full stops we use today.
The oldest known punctuation appears on the Mesha Stele of the 9th century BC, with dots between words and strokes between sections. Around the 5th century BC Greeks began stacking two or three dots to guide oral delivery. After 200 BC, Aristophanes of Byzantium devised a system of single dots placed low, midway or high on the line to mark short, medium and full divisions of speech. Romans adopted it under the name distinctiones.
Mass copying of the Bible pushed things further. Jerome and his colleagues, producing the Latin Vulgate around AD 400, set each unit of sense on its own indented line, borrowing a method used to teach the speeches of Cicero and Demosthenes. In the 7th and 8th centuries, Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes, whose own languages did not descend from Latin, needed more help reading it; Irish scribes introduced gaps between words, and insular copyists signalled pause length by one, two or three marks. Under the Carolingians, symbols originally meant to guide chanting spread into everyday manuscripts, including an early question mark.
Printing changed the purpose. After movable type reached Europe in the 1450s, uniform letters let people read far faster, leaving no time to puzzle over sentence structure. Martin Luther's Bible, one of the first mass-printed books, used little beyond the slash and full stop. Gradually punctuation became standardised to show how words relate grammatically, and by the 19th century grammarians ranked the marks by weight. Chinese classics, by contrast, circulated unpunctuated until Song dynasty scholars began adding marks.
Placement still matters enormously. Woman, without her man, is nothing means the opposite of woman: without her, man is nothing. In 1966 the French writer Hervé Bazin proposed six new marks for tone that now look like ancestors of emoji.
Source: Punctuation
