1. The Semicolon “ Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath .” Lewis Thomas (American Physician and Writer, 1913-1993)
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4. In 1560, it was introduced into English. A London printer, Henry Denham, used semicolons regularly; we can see them in the publication of “A Golden Chaine” by Thomas Rogers
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Hinweis der Redaktion
Aldus Manutius explains it as a sort of compromise: the semi-circle (i.e. comma), he says, doesn't give a long enough pause, whereas the double point (i.e. the colon) slows up the speech too much.
Punctuation guides interpretation, indicating relationships and nuances in a text. Because punctuation performs these three different functions in a written text, Humanists marked texts heavily and invented new marks (the semi-colon, the exclamation point, the question mark, parentheses).
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