CONFERENCEJosé Antonio Millán

[La Casa Encendida, Madrid, September 2nd, 2007]

The graphic representation of language in the Western World by José Antonio Millán

[extract]

Why a conference on punctuation signs within the context of a festival such as Punto y Raya? In this festival, organised by my friends from mad-actions, we are challenged to perceive in a new light the minimum grains of figuration -like the dot and line- and the elements that these can generate. Within this context, there is something quite interesting to tell about our written language and the application of dots and lines.

We live in a very alphabetised era, full of written documents, but language is mostly a verbal language: it is the impulse, the neuma, the voice modulated by the phonic organs. If you reflect upon language stripped of its written expression, you will see that it is, in part, imminently musical: that it has certain tones when language suspends implying that something's about to follow; there's the concursive case, when the pitch lowers to indicate that something's about to finish... it has pauses... it has all these elements and many more, like my voice, for instance, which conveys information about my sex, my physiognomy -generally speaking-, about my education level and about the logic of the tongue in which I am communicating with you.

Putting down in writing all these elements is a very complex and delicate process; the proof is that, to this day, it hasn't been achieved completely, and very possibly there won't be any need to do so. But it is well known that about 2.000 years of history have been dedicated to put down in writing many of the elements of our spoken language. And what I'm here to tell you about, is only a small review of this long process, mostly centred on the applications of the dot and the line, that is, on the punctuation signs.

In a first stage, we can mention the ideas proposed by ancient Greeks or Romans for the creation of a transcription system of spoken language. The first solution is, as many of you may know, a kind of letter soup. If you take a look at certain inscriptions of remote times or parchments with primitive writings, you'll be surprised to notice that not only they lack punctuation signs, but there are also no blank spaces between the words; they simply don't exist.

· Roman rustic librarian writing [s. IV]

It is a kind of –I insist– letter soup, which demanded from the reader certain skills to be deciphered. The basis of punctuation lies in these skills to decipher a magma of letters and articulate them. In fact, if we think of Rome, where the readers (mostly slaves) read aloud to their masters, the first thing they had to do was to prepare the text placing certain dots and lines to indicate themselves how to proceed: where to stop, where to raise the pitch, where to lower it, etc. This is what we call a private punctuation; a punctuation which, towards the II, III and IV centuries, was prepared by each of those who would read a text aloud.

There is a funny anecdote in "The Satyricon”, when Trimalchio kisses a young boy during supper. Trimalchio's wife grows upset, but her husband -a character who's have a too rapid social ascent- retorts:

“Do not worry, I don't kiss this boy out of passion, but because he is a genius: he can divide by ten” (something quite complicated to do in Roman numerals) “and reads at first sight”.

As I've mentioned before, a reader had to prepare the text placing little dots and lines to create a personal punctuation.

Very well, from this moment on there are three main events -which I will summarise quickly- through which the current punctuation system is finally established. The process is very hard and carried out through a series of revolutions; it is convenient to stress out the revolution initiated by Emperor Charlemagne in the VIII century; the second was the printing revolution in the XV-XVI centuries, when a certain standardisation was achieved; and lastly, the normative revolution in the XVIII century , when the Academies emerge; these being basically a bunch of old gentlemen who lecture anybody who won't do things their way. This is a general picture of the situation. If you allow me, I will start talking about each punctuation sign to describe some of its properties. I would probably start with the

period, after which this festival was named [T.N.: "punto" in Spanish].

Etymologically speaking, the period is related to "puncture". And it is one of the first signs to appear in manuscripts and all other kinds of written documents. In a sense, the period is the mother of all signs, which aren't called "punctuation signs" for nothing. The period starts as the only punctuation sign. It is progressively placed wherever there are pauses in the discourse, and one of its first applications is as a variable pause. That is, the low period indicates a brief pause (it would be like a current comma); the middle period would be equivalent to a semicolon, and a high period would be equal to our current period. As this posed many problems from the readers' and scribes' points of view, little by little new signs were created. For many centuries, these new signs appear and disappear in a private way. It was common practice for a school of copyists or writers to make up a new punctuation sign, as the Visigoths did with their dot inscribed within a circle. To them, this sign represented the exclamation point.

Ok. Well, as someone makes up a new sign, followers emerge everywhere, and as it is recognised by the readers, this particular punctuation sign sticks. Thus, in the VIII century there is an authentic orgy of all kinds of signs, and it won't be until the invention of the printing press, when these signs will finally acquire a more permanent shape.

But, parallel to the signs' development, there is also another important element which evolves during this period: the application of the blank space. Blank spaces start separating the words, not such an easy task as one should imagine. If any of you has the chance to see a letter or a text written by an almost uneducated person, you will be surprised at the funny separations and conjunctions of words you'll find. Not only the separation between words was achieved through a long period of time, but the partition of the text in paragraphs was a huge task to accomplish as well.

At the beginning, the print merely imitated the manuscripts; but later it started to ease the task for the readers. In fact, there's a very clear case of this process in a work by Fray Luis de León edited in 1500's; the text is a kind of amorphous mass of letters without any partitions in paragraphs and almost no divisions in chapters. This book was re-edited 200 years later, and the editor writes about it:

“I've considered convenient to open the paragraphs, so that people not very used to reading may find some places to rest.” The revolution created by the printing press entails -no more and no less- that there are many more people who want to read, many more people who need to read and it is necessary to make things easier for them. The difference between the Roman text, which only a grammarian could prepare, and the text that any person with standard alphabetisation can read, is simply huge; and this gap was bridged during this time.

As I mentioned before, the period is the basic element and appears very early. The comma is other of the elements that appear and disappear during the great orgy of punctuation signs which, towards the XVI century, will be quite stabilised.

“Coma” is a Greek word that means pause, partition. And in fact, even the colon was called "comma" at the beginning. That is, comma just indicated a pause. When the first commas appear, something very interesting happens: the commas codify the musical form of certain properties of language. For instance, if I say “We bought pears, plums and apples”... Well, from a strictly phonetic point of view, between pears and plums there is a raise in pitch and a pause. And after the word "apples", there is a descent in pitch. The comma codifies this pause and this raise in pitch, and it has a very important logical interpretation:If I say “Do you want some pears, plums or apples?”, the pause means “OR”. If I say “We bought pears, plums and apples”, the pause means "AND”. The phonetic interpretation is, in both cases, the same: a raise in pitch. When the comma appears, a fixed codification of the text also emerges, because one of the functions of the punctuation signs is to help avoid second interpretations. I'll name an example which raised much controversy and probably, even blood has been spilt because of it. It is from Saint Luke's Gospel, when Christ is on the cross and says to a thief:

“In truth I tell thee today that you shall be with me in paradise”.

Right. In the original Aramaic there were no commas, as there were no commas in the early Scriptures, but at a certain time in history it was necessary to fix the logical structure of this phrase in the Western world, and that is how two interpretations emerged. One states that the phrase means "In truth I tell thee today, you shall be

with me in paradise”. The second says“In truth I tell thee, today you shall be with me in paradise”.

The difference is not at all trivial, because in one case it is implied that the thief will be in paradise on that very day, and therefore, there will be a trial and the thief will go to heaven that same day. According to the second interpretation, the thief will merely be in paradise someday. For much less than this, religious wars have been fought and certainly, this is a great example of how a comma can strongly change the interpretation of certain texts.

The semicolon emerges much later than the period and the comma. It represents an intermediate diction, certainly useful at times, mostly when we're dealing with long paragraphs or ideas. This was a new element, which required certain subtlety from both writer and reader, and in fact, after its invention by the Italian editors, a Spanish grammarian writes about it: “I think that this sign is too specific and too subtle for the Spanish language”.Even today not many people use the semicolon in Spanish or in French.

In some printed books, the colon is the only sign accompanying the period. For instance, "The Grammar of Spanish Language" by Antonio de Lebrija published in 1492, is punctuated exclusively with periods and colons. That is, this is the time when the colon acted as a comma.From that moment on, the colon changed to indicate that something was about to come. There's a very nice example of this by Jorge Luis Borges, which illustrates the kind of subtleties one can add to the punctuation system. It is particularly interesting as Borges was very concerned about using a correct punctuation. In fact, the case I'm referring to is an amendment he does between the first writing of one of his short-stories and its definite version. The short-story is "The Aleph”.

As you may remember, the aleph is a mysterious place from which you can see the whole world, and which Borges' character finds quite by accident. This character, named Carlos Argentino Daneri, narrates in the 1940's -when the short-story was written for the first time- why he thinks that the aleph belongs to him:

“It is mine, it is mine; I discovered it in my childhood, before school-age”.

When Borges revises all his texts in 1974, he usually makes very few amendments. In the National Library in Madrid you can find -if nobody has stolen it yet- Borges' original manuscript; a beautiful little school-book where he wrote "The Aleph". And checking this text against the one amended in 1974, you will notice the following change:

“It is mine, it is mine: I discovered it in my childhood, before school-age”.

It is a subtlety, but well, literature is made of subtleties. And this was no minor change. In the first case, we find two elements articulated in the same sentence, but there is no casuistic relation between them. The second case can be understood as a form of explanation.

This kind of word-play and delicacies are part of the world of the punctuation signs, these dots and lines we are currently so used to working with, and any person who holds a professional relation to texts cannot disdain any of them.

It seems that there is certain relation between musical notation and orthographical notation and in fact, this isn't at all surprising: as I mentioned earlier, spoken language has many musical properties and many punctuation signs have tonal implications. It is quite curious, because the Roman reader scenario we discussed earlier, where a grammarian had to prepare the text with private signs before he could read it, is exactly what happens nowadays with the

execution of a musical score. In general, a musician does not pick up a score and starts playing, but writes down his or her own signs to indicate certain things that the original score cannot fully convey.

The ellipsis acts in a similar way as the fermata.

               The fermata is an element of musical notation, which interrupts the melody for an indefinite amount of time, left to the player's discretion. The ellipsis is this kind of fermata with many applications. For example, it delays the second part of a phrase. If we talk about the famous fable of the "birth on the mountain", we would say:

“And after the convulsions and the aperture of the great moles... a little mouse was born”.

Ok. This is the application of the ellipsis: it delays the second part of a clause or lets it linger completely: “You're a...”, ellipsis. I would say that almost each sign has had its glory days. And the ellipsis' glory days (as well as the exclamation point's) are during the Romanticism. Romantic writers used the ellipsis as a customisable sign. You could write down any amount of dots as you wished, according to the emotional charge you wanted to convey. I have with me an example from a novel published in 1848, where the ellipsis can have 3, 4, 5 or even 6 dots.

“I tremble at the idea of enquiring Eduardo's heart... (3) Is everything there?.... (4) If he stopped loving me.....(5) Oh, let's throw away that idea....(4) To me, there is no life beyond Eduardo's love.....(5) Nothing..... (5) Not even my own son..... (5) There he is..... (5) sick..... (5) and being his mother, I cannot even approach him......" (6)

The Romantic writer used the ellipsis as a musical means to convey emotions. Of course, today the ellipsis only has three dots and the reader must work out what intensity, what emphasis he should convey to the sentence.

The question mark appears as a musical notation that would indicate -as we can still appreciate in some writings from Charlemagne's era- that the voice's pitch raises; and from that time it begins to emerge, mostly at the end of the sentences. The question mark created many debates in the XVI centuries that still remain to be solved. The grammarians from that period soon realised that there were two kinds of questions: one would be something like “What time is it?” or “How much money have you got?”. These questions are resolved or perfected by an answer: “It is five o'clock ”, “I've got five euros”. But questions like “How many times have I told you to wash your hands before you eat?” don't require a 3, a 5 or a hundred for an answer. They are rhetorical questions. In the XVI century in England, somebody suggested to use the mirror-image of our question mark to indicate that an interrogation was rethorical, whilst the normal closing question mark we currently use, would be applied to non-rhetorical questions. This was, no doubt about it, a huge step forward.

In Spanish, it is very often difficult to know whether a sentence is a question or not. A phrase like “The kid goes to school on his own” can be a question: “The kid goes to school on his own?”; it can be an exclamation: “The kid goes to school on his own!”; or it can merely be an enunciation: “The kid goes to school on his own.” If a Spanish-speaking person starts to read (and this is a short phrase, but if it were longer...) he has to wait for quite a long time to find out whether he has to wonder, or ask, or exclaim, or whatever. Thus, the academics decided to do something about it -and that is frankly what they are for. In the second edition of the Academic Orthography of 1754, they state as follows:

“The difficulty has consisted on the election of the sign, as to employ for this end those signs which serve to accentuate or to other uses would give rise to misunderstandings" (obviously) "and to create a new note" (that is, a new sign) “would be reparable and perhaps, not well accepted. Thus, after long examination, the Academy has decided to use the same interrogation note in an inverse position, placed before the word where the interrogative intonation starts, accompanied by the interrogation note that the interrogative sentence must regularly have at its end”.

By inverting the closing question mark, Spanish-speaking people, the Galician -in some version of the Galician norm- and I think nobody else, know nowadays when to start an interrogative intonation from the very beginning of the sentence. To conclude with the question mark, I must mention that it is one of the few signs which currently keeps creating some tension. The reason is quite simple: some phrases can be interrogative and exclamative at the same time. For example: “But... you ate that huge pudding all by yourself”. In Spanish, this sentence can be an interrogation, a rhetorical question, or an exclamation. In fact, in the origins of punctuation in the XVI century, the same question mark -with its nice little belly and everything- could be applied to exclamative and interrogative phrases. nd truth is that many phrases could perfectly be one thing or the other. This is why the Academy recommends for this kind of sentences the use of a phrase which begins with an exclamation point and ends with a question mark, or the other way round.

But when dealing with languages that cannot open and close its question marks or exclamation points, it is quite obvious that this tool is unavailable. In 1962 took place the last reformation of the contemporary Western orthographical system -to my knowledge-, when an English graphic designer proposed the creation of a new sign named interrogang: the merging of the closing exclamation point and the question mark into one single sign. The interrogang was almost never used; I've only seen it in a Harry Potter's parody named "Barry Trotter”, a quite funny book for those who've read the original. Instead of the famous scar that Harry has on his forehead (the origin of the whole story), Barry wears an interrogang sign.

The exclamation point, introduced in its current form during the XIV century, has many applications.

For example, it may be a warning; it may accompany an insult (if I write that a character calls another "Asshole!", I would write it followed by an exclamation point). It may be an order: “Get out of there!”; it may indicate an increase in volume, it may be an emphatic affirmation; a wish, a plea, a cry of joy... surprise: “¡Ohh!”; compassion, pain: ¡Ouch!”; admiration... That is, there's a whole bunch of emotions we must convey using exclamation points because we have no other means.

Once, someone proposed to create a sign for those things expressed in a low tone, as for example, by whispering. And to represent this, it's been suggested the implementation of the plus sign.

With this, I will end this quick review over the punctuation system, bringing back what I mentioned at the beginning: from all the subtleties in human spoken language only a few can be reasonably transcribed in writing; many have no direct representation; the dots and lines we place between the letters contain so many subtle information that may produce completely different interpretations, and luckily for us, many elements remain open to the interpretation of the reader and to the desires of the writer.Thank you very much.

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