Aristophanes of Byzantium's punctuation dots
Sistema de puntos de puntuación de Aristófanes de Bizancio
- Date
- c. 200 BCE · confidence medium
- Place
- Alexandria, Egypt
- Credited to
- Aristophanes of Byzantium, librarian of Alexandria
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
A system of dots set at three heights to mark pauses of different lengths when reading Greek texts written without spaces. It is the origin of the full stop, comma and colon.
The attribution rests on late sources; the system was applied to editing poetry, not to everyday use.
What it led to
- intelligible reading aloud of continuous texts
- the terms comma, colon and period in Western grammar
- the semicolon and the other modern marks