Medical paleography / by George M. Gould.

  • Gould, George Milbrey, 1848-1922.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical paleography / by George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    the letter i, and either by noncrossing the t, or doing so by long loops and swirls. Punctuation, properly speaking, began_about the ^io*]ith century A..13., but was not fixed until after the invention of printing. Points of various kinds were used after each word so far back as the oldest inscrip- tions. These dots were sometimes single, sometimes double or triple (in the form of a triangle) or quad- ruple (in the form of a square, though also occasion- ally placed in the form of a circle, diamond, etc., etc.). But the object was to separate words, not parts or entire sentences, and hence it was not punctuation. One author, Aristophanes of Byzantium, in the sec- ond century B.C., used a dot at the top of the end of a complete sentence; for an incomplete sentence, corresponding to our own semicolon or colon, he placed the point as we place our period ; correspond- ing to our comma he placed the dot at the middle of the space. The example of Aristophanes, however, was little followed—a commentary upon the intelli- gence and conservatism of the copyists—and most of the manuscripts of the middle ages are poorly or not at all punctuated. In Caxton’s Mallory’s Lemorte darthur the sole punctuation sign is a slanting line, and an occasional reversed capital D, or para- graph sign. The Origin of Modern Punctuation Marks is strangely omitted in the treatises and cyclopedias. Only in the last edition of Chambers have I been able to find anything approximating an explanation of, or even suggesting, their evolution. It thus trans- pires that students of evolution, history, and embry- ology, while spending their lives in studying the origin of worlds or organisms, are indifferent to the origins of the letters, punctuation marks, signs, and symbols they make use of, every time pen is placed on paper. The fact seems to be that our modern punctuation marks are the conventionalized relics of some of the most used contractions of the medieval copyists. With the increasing demand for books, as I have before said, the necessity of lessening the cost of material and of labor, united with laziness to develop crowded writing and the tremendous system of contractions.