[PW] Conference on Punctuation?

[Ramona Grimsley]

You may have already come across this info....

In general,
When we read Franklin or Adams or some of the elite talking about how
ignorant 'the masses' were, they are comparing them to the scholars
with which they conversed. To them, if you couldn't read [and recite
much of] the classics in Latin, and recognize a little Greek, then you
were uneducated. The 1/2 of the Cont. Congress that attended
college, went off at 14 or 15 and spent 4-7 years in intense study at
Harvard or Yale or all over Europe. By their standards, I think
they'd find most of today's population 'illiterate'. [and by our
standards, most elementary kids would consider them illiterate for
their poor sentence structure, unregulated spelling and random
punctuation and capitalization.<g>]

http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/read/AMERICAN-REVOLUTION/2000-08/0965485161

also,
http://books.google.com/books?id=Ll1hhbKSw4cC&pg=PA156&lpg=PA156&dq=rules+punctuation+1770's&source=web&ots=3phmRB1ZOr&sig=GatT4Itdvw7YkLXqabSzlRCXjhk
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/Spelling and punctuation became more regular and standardized toward 
the end of the century. What forces influenced this process?/

Education; the wider availability of spelling and grammar handbooks; the 
increasing influence of the printed page, which tended to impose a 
certain uniformity on orthography. But you'd have to make a more 
fine-grained distinction here, I think. Handwriting continued to be less 
systematized and more conservative than print right into the late 
eighteenth century. Spelling conventions and punctuation tended to be 
much more fluid in manuscript than in print. I recently had the 
experience of trying to transcribe and digitize a junior naval officer's 
logbook from 1770---it had the manifold inconsistency in spelling and 
punctuation that one might associate with something written two 
centuries earlier.

http://ask.metafilter.com/60728/True-ease-in-writing-comes-from-art-not-chance
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All forms of punctuation became standardized with printing, but early 
punctuation was more related to speaking than to reading. Rhetoric, as 
the study of speech, needed marks to indicate when the speaker should 
pause to give emphasis, and that was what early punctuation was based 
on, rather than being related to the logical structure of written 
sentences. In elementary school, we still often learn how punctuation is 
used by thinking of how a sentence is spoken (thus, the injunction to 
use a comma when you pause). After the invention of printing, 
grammarians developed a theory of punctuation related to structure 
rather than sound. While these rules of English punctuation were pretty 
much established by the end of the 18th century, they are not fixed in 
stone. Change in punctuation, however, is slower than change in word use.
http://www.nyu.edu/classes/copyXediting/Punctuation.html#history
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The use of punctuation was not standardized until after the invention of 
printing. Credit for introducing a standard system is generally given to 
Aldus Manutius </wiki/Aldus_Manutius> and his grandson. They popularized 
the practice of ending sentences with the colon 
</wiki/Colon_%28punctuation%29> or full stop </wiki/Full_stop>, invented 
the semicolon </wiki/Semicolon>, made occasional use of parentheses 
</wiki/Bracket#Parentheses_.28_.29>, and created the modern comma 
</wiki/Comma_%28punctuation%29> by lowering the virgule 
</wiki/Virgule>.^[2] <#_note-Truss>

^http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation
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The system of punctuation now used by writers of English has been 
complete since the 17th century. Three of its most important components 
are the space left blank between words; the indentation of the first 
line of a new paragraph; and the uppercase, or capital, letter written 
at the beginning of a sentence and at the beginning of a proper name or 
a title. The marks of punctuation, also known as points or stops, and 
the chief parts that they play in the system are as follows.

The end of a grammatically complete sentence is marked by a full point, 
full stop, or period. The period may also be used to mark 
*abbreviations*. The colon (:), which was once used like a full point 
and was followed by an uppercase letter, now serves mainly to indicate 
the beginning of a list, summary, or quotation. The semicolon (;) ranks 
halfway between a comma and a full point. It may be substituted for a 
period between two grammatically complete sentences that are closely 
connected in sense; in a long or complicated sentence, it may precede a 
coordinate conjunction (such as "or," "and," or "but"). A most usual 
means of indicating the syntactical turning points in a sentence, it is 
exposed to abuse. It may be used to separate the elements of a series, 
before a relative clause that does not limit or define its antecedent, 
in pairs to set off or isolate words or phrases, or in combination with 
coordinating conjunctions.

Other punctuation marks used in modern English include parentheses, 
which serve, like a pair of commas, to isolate a word or phrase; 
question, exclamation, and quotation marks; the hyphen; and the apostrophe.

http://wps.ablongman.com/long_johnsonshe_tct_1/0,10006,1798252-content,00.html
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Ann Borkin wrote:
> I've been asked to find details on a conference in NY this month on the 
> use of punctuation in Revolutionary War times.
>
> I've checked the linguists' conference calendar at 
> http://linguistlist.org/callconf/index.html , and have googled intensely.  
> Now I'm looking at NY college and university web sites.
>
> Anybody have other suggestions?
>
> thanks for reading
>
> Ann Borkin
> aborkin at thelen.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> Project Wombat
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>
>