When did the English language start using punctuation?

Answer 1

The English language has always used some sort of punctuation. Punctuation marks were not standardized until the invention of the Printing Press in the 15th century. At first, punctuation was used merely to indicate a break-up in the way sentence were spoken. After the printing press was invented, however, grammarians began to develop a theory that punctuation should be formed depending on the structure of the sentence, not merely how it sounds.

The history of punctuation goes back to the 9th century, when Romans started separating inscriptions on their monuments with dots. Later, a librarian in Alexandria became the first to coin the terms "comma," "colon," and "period," although they were very different from what we use today.

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Answer 2

Answering your question as accurately as possible, sometime between the Roman occupation and the the Late Antique period (200 CE to 600 CE). Punctuation was used far before the printing press was invented

Punctuation has been used since we had a written script. If you look closely, you will see that English uses the Latin alphabet with a couple of Greek letters such as Z and Y (zeta and upsilon). The terms colon, comma, and period are actually terms given to clauses. A punctuation mark was later invented to differentiate the different types of clauses at a later time. The Romans always used a mark that looked like a raised period, much like a hyphen - but with a dot instead. It meant the same thing as a period. If you go to Rome, you can see these marks on monuments from as early as the 1st century BCE. The Greeks used a ; (looks like a semi-colon but was actually a dot with a straight line underneath) in order to show a question ("?" today). The idea that a librarian from Alexandria coined the terms is completely false. The person who came up with that has obviously never read Aristotle or the Ad Herrenium in Latin or Ancient Greek. The word kolon in Greek means clause. A librarian did not invent the word.

Punctuation, although rare, was used in the Codex Vaticanus of the 300s.

When the Romans invaded England and most of Europe, the barbarians did not have a system of writing, but had a spoken language. The Latins gave them writing and taught them Latin. At first, only the nobility would write, but later, a middle class developed and more and more people began to write in the vernacular language (an evolved form of Latin). Because paper had not made its way from China and because we were using animal hide (parchment) in the north (no papyrus up there), most writings in English did not survive unless they were continuously copied. We can not tell when the various punctuation marks were invented because they were obviously inserted at a later date.

Answer 3

The English language in its present form has only really existed since the years following the Norman Conquest. Punctuation was not used in Anglo Saxon and it was light and haphazard up to the time of the development of printing. William Caxton (1474), the first printer of books in English, used three punctuation marks: the stroke (/) for marking word groups, the colon (:) for marking distinct syntactic pauses, and the full stop (.) for marking the ends of sentences and brief pauses.

Answer 4

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