The Birth of the Semicolon

The semicolon has one of those surprisingly dramatic histories that can make you look twice, being such a simple thing within writing.

First born in Venice in 1494, this was during a time when writers were experimenting wildly with language, and where punctuation wasn’t established with fixed rules, but entirely where punctuation marks were discarded reguarly. These expansive uses of text, across both printed and handwritten uses, were pioneered by the literarati known as the Italian humanists (to clear up some confusion, a literati refers to people who have a love or reading!). Focusing on studying Greek and Roman classical texts, they seeked to create a "cultural rebirth" of sorts, after the Middle ages passed. Through this process, the humanists ended up creating a new form of writing bringing forth punctuation and finally, fostering the use of the modern semicolon.

As a way of serving middle ground between the pause of commas and the complete stop of a colon, the semi-colon became a tool to comprehend complex sentences easier, the very first example shown in Aldus Manutius's version of Pietro Bembo's De Aetna. With the text being a dialogue essay, De Aetna's story was about climbing the volcanic Mount Etna in Italy. On the print of this first edition, semicolons were frequently present throughout in order to help readers, below is an example.

Don't get confused here with the strange almost-selmicolon marks, as some are used to shortern words into abbreviatons compared to sentences. As punctuation changes throughout history, the use of this little mark with a hat can be a mystery to some people, as a hyphen can be used in some cases rather than a semicolon. These symbols still have stood against thousands of years and vary along with modern text as it grows and changes in new ways.

Thanks for reading, see you next time!