By whom and when were the punctuation marks created?

Answer

Original alphabetical texts had no punctuation marks, no capital letters and no spaces between the words: they were so simple and matter-of-fact that only a long row of letters was enough to make them intelligible.

It was only with longer, narrative texts, which often had to be read aloud, that it became important to indicate where pauses, ascending melody (at the end of a question) and emphasis should be placed, so as not to turn it into a soup of letters. The first texts were Greek plays, where the actors read through low, medium, and high dots between the words where to stop the sentence. The systems were especially expanded in the first century of our era with the distribution of Bibles, which had to be read. In the oldest version you can trace the origin of the very first capital letters and periods.

The next step towards standardization of all those ‘floating’ punctuation marks in the margins came about through the printing press. Aldus Manutius and his grandson Aldus Manutius the Younger, two printer-publishers in 15th and 16th century Venice, made a commercial success of Gutenberg’s invention with their very popular ‘pocket’ editions. Among other things, the Manutius company introduced the comma and semicolon, the quotation marks, which they used consistently in all their editions. Question and exclamation marks followed much later.

In the 20th century, punctuation marks became smaller and less varied, as typewriters had a limited number of keys, and also wanted to use as little ink ribbon as possible for punctuation.

There are still many variations in punctuation marks between Western languages. Greeks use a semicolon as a question mark and a raised period as a semicolon; Spaniards use an inverted question or exclamation mark at the beginning of such sentences; French and Russians use guillemets (“double parentheses”) instead of our hanging quotes.