Semicolons, periods, commas, quotations... But does anyone know how punctuation arose in the first place, how it evolved? What kind of punctuation is used in non-Roman writing system? Are westerners the only people to use capitalization?
My god, I should just stop coming here and instead, spend all of my time reading wikipedia. Thanks, AmishRakeFight
To my knowledge, the Western alphabets are the only ones that have majuscule and miniscule (upper and lower case) forms of their letters. The first one was Greek and most of the others evolved from it--some over time and some created by monks to transcribe the languages of newly Christianized people. That would be the Cyrillic alphabet of the Russians and various other (but not all) Slavic languages and the Roman alphabet including its variations such as the Irish. The Armenian alphabet, which is not derived from the Greek, also has upper and lower case letters. I suspect there are a few others that slipped my mind. The rules for capitalization are not uniform. Most languages capitalize only the first word of every sentence and proper nouns--names of people, countries, etc. in their noun form. Mary, Scotland, Africa. English is far more liberal, retaining the capital letter from geographic names in all derived words: Scot, Scots, Scottish. German goes berserk: all nouns are capitalized, always, and nothing else except the first letter of a sentence.
The newspapers print lists in a sentence without the last comma, all to save ink. "...x,y and z" versus "...x,y, and z" which is what I was taught in school.