According to the New World Encyclopaedia [1] and Wikipedia[2] the oldest use of punctuation was in a document called "Mesha Stele." or "Moabit stone."
It was written circa 850 BCE by King Mesha of Moab (now part of Jordan) and is notable for
employing points between the words and horizontal strokes between the sense section as punctuation.
It was discovered in 1868 and is on display at the Louvre Museum.
It is also the oldest known reference to the Hebrew god Yahweh.
Movable type and printing in the 14th and 15th centuries saw the beginnings of punctuation as we know it today.
The introduction of a standard system of punctuation is attributed to Aldo Manuzio.
He is credited with popularizing the practice of ending sentences with the colon or full stop and also for inventing Italic type.
Punctuation in other European languages is the same as English with a few exceptions.
Punctuation in other European languages is the same as English with a few exceptions.
In France for instance instead of inverted commas for quotation marks they use << and >>.
Greeks use the semicolon ( ;) as a question mark and in Spain they put an upside down question mark at the beginning of a question and a normal question mark at the end.
So it would look like this:
¿Is your name Bernie? – except it would be in Spanish of course.
Hebrew punctuation is as complicated as ours and more difficult to write. They in fact have their own keyboard with their own letters and punctuation.
Greeks use the semicolon ( ;) as a question mark and in Spain they put an upside down question mark at the beginning of a question and a normal question mark at the end.
So it would look like this:
¿Is your name Bernie? – except it would be in Spanish of course.
Hebrew punctuation is as complicated as ours and more difficult to write. They in fact have their own keyboard with their own letters and punctuation.
Sometimes it has Arabic letters and symbols as well due to the high percentage of Arab speakers in Israel.
Chinese, Japanese and Korean didn’t originally have punctuation as their language(s) are made up of symbols rather than letters.
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Punctuation Puzzle
I remember my Father testing me on this one.
Insert the comma(s) in the correct place.
The teacher said that that that that that boy used should have been which.
Where do the commas go?
[1]New World Encyclopedia. 22 Oct 2008, 15:24 UTC. 7 Oct 2011, 02:51 <http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Mesha_Stele?oldid=836298>
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#History
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