Tea at Trianon: How Irish Monks Invented Punctuation

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, February 11, 2024

How Irish Monks Invented Punctuation

From Aleteia:

It wasn’t until the 7th century that monks in Ireland (to whom we owe so much), accustomed to the Old Irish alphabet (an ancient precursor of their modern language) and struggling to decipher Latin texts, tried to reform the way of writing. They began to separate words from each other, using the space we know today. It was also at this time that punctuation began to take shape, such as the comma, which was then no more than a slash, or the beginnings of the question mark. This is also the origin of the pilcrow, a kind of inverted “P” (¶), which comes from writing “C” twice with a slight offset, as an abbreviation of the word capitulum (chapter) and indicating the end of a paragraph. However, its usage was limited to the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon worlds, since it wasn’t until the reign of Charlemagne at the end of the 8th century that a reform of grammar imposed its rules on writing.
Word separation was still in its infancy, and the intervals between words remained random until the 12th century. It was then that words finally became clearly distinguishable from one another, removing ambiguities of interpretation, as in the famous example of “Godisnowhere,” which can just as easily be read “God is now here” as “God is nowhere.” (Read more.)