Asked whether punctuation was a democratising force, the historian traced it to Alexandrian librarians marking Greek for non-native readers, Irish monks glossing Latin, and 19th-century Egyptian writers importing European punctuation to make Arabic easier to read.
fair to say that that change was also a part of like democratizing writing? Because one of the things when you read everything in a long line is you have to have training and stuff on like how words are spelled and what's likely to be a boundary and all this common knowledge, which if you only
have a few people in your population who can read and write and they're specialists in it, they have all this like mountain of expertise. But if you want lots of people to read, it's hard to build up that expertise maybe among everyone. So would you say that punctuation is like a
democratizing force? Yes, absolutely. And we see that really throughout this entire history of punctuation, there always came from an impulse to make writing more accessible. And that might be ancient or like Greek influenced Egypt. You know, this library in Alexandria that might be Ireland in the 8th century or that might be Egypt in the 19th century. So there's always this impulse to make writing more accessible and understandable for a larger amount of people. In Greece or in Alexandria, it was the librarians who tried to develop this point system, this, you know, or dot system for learners or for readers of their manuscripts who were not native speakers of Greek. And then we have the monks who Are themselves speaking Gaelic, so they're like Irish, and they are translating the Bible from Latin into Gaelic, or like they were copying the Bible and then they were trying to figure out, okay, which does this word mean in Gaelic, and they were kind of copying it above the Latin. And so, again, these are learners that try to get access to something. In 19th century Egypt, people are like the Egyptian elite or Arab writers saw Arabic not being used so much for more mundane day-to-day…
a very interesting perspective. Yeah, who would want women to read and write? It's
terrible idea.
And, you know, if we're talking about punctuation being political, we can point to hyphens. We had a chat quite a while ago with Dr. Pardas Madavi, University of Arizona, about her book, Hyphen. And like you do in On the Mark, she mentions the hyphen as a signifier of identity, but also it's…
