Aspects of punctuation in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre
-
Javier Calle Martín
and
Antonio Miranda García
Abstract
1. Introduction
The punctuation system of mediaeval manuscripts can be compared to the experience of using a new software application. When confronted with scribal punctuation for the first time, it is as if you had the intimidating commands of the menu bar in front of you, waiting for a mouse click. In the case of punctuation marks, one cannot help but look at them with a bewildered glance and wonder about the kinds of pauses that they signal, or even try to find some sort of coherence within the set of symbols at hand. This has been precisely the general contention until late in the 20th century, before which time scribal punctuation had been neglected in the assumption that it was meaningless and haphazard, scattered at random through the folios of the manuscript (Jenkinson 1926: 154; Denholm-Young 1954: 77; Zeeman 1956: 11-18; Heyworth 1981: 139-140). In this vein, Parkes argued that the apparent chaos of most manuscripts is just a scribal convention whereby “scribes and correctors punctuate where confusion is likely to arise and do not always punctuate where confusion is not likely to arise” (Parkes 1978: 138-139).
© 2006 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Abraham Ibn-Ezra's viewpoint regarding the Hebrew language and the biblical text in the context of medieval environment
- Exploring exaptation in language change
- Liturgical Hebrew in 13th-15th century Catalonia
- Nonspecific free relatives and (anti)grammaticalization in English and German
- Bed & Board: The role of alliteration in twin formulas of Middle English prose
- Aspects of punctuation in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre
- Persistence and renewal in the relative pronoun paradigm: The case of Italian
- Specificational pseudo-clefts in Old Japanese
- Thoughts on the question of Gurage: Now you see it, now you don't
- Lines on an African-Semitic language: The case of Tigrinya
- Michiko Ogura, Verbs of motion in Medieval English
