Thanks yo Ian Dunn, who e-mailed me in to say, "Where does the term full stop come from?" in our punctuation. And modern punctuation owes, it turns out, a lot to someone called Aristophanes, and he was a librarian from the 3rd century BC, and he grew more and more frustrated with the difficulties of reading unbroken text in the hundreds of thouthand of scrolls that were housed at his library in Alexandria. And it was he, thanks to this frustration, who introduced the notion for marking texts for rhythm and sense, and his breakthrough was to suggest that readers could annotate the documents and just break up this unbroken stream of text with dots of ink, and they would be at the middle, the top or the bottom of each line. And they were correspondent to pauses of increasing lenght, that would be inserted between formal parts of speech, so, the comma, the colon and the periodos, as they called it. It wasn't quite punctuation as we know it, but Aristophanus definitely set us ot the way to where we are today. As it turns out, the Romans scrapped all of this, but of courc=se, eventually puncruation prevailed, much more sophisticated symbols came about. And Aristophanes' dot survives in the full stop, and the full stop was originally used to mean the end of a speech, and Shakespeare was uset it in that way in THe Merchant of Venice and other plays. But it made absolute sense for that full stop name to be taken to mark the end of the sentence, a complete break in meaning, if you like, and there it has stayed to this day. But it all goes back to that librarian, Aristophanes, which I find quite fascinating.
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