Aristophanes of Byzantium

Ptolemy down in Egypt, where the Library of Alexandria was, heard rumors that, that Eumenes was creating this library and intended it to rival the one there.

And so when he heard that, he even heard that, that he had tried to hire away the famous librarian of Alexandria, a man, a man named Aristophanes.

So Ptolemy imprisoned Aristophanes, and he ended all exports of papyrus to Pergamum.

Papyrus was the primary paper of the ancient world.

So Pergamum had to come up with a new paper, new writing material, and it landed with parchment.

They were scholars, but they didn't have Greek as their native language, and so they started to invent punctuation and other kinds of signs to help these non-native Greek speakers along.

And one of these, um, librarians was Aristophanes of Byzantium around 200 BC, who included dots at different levels of the line to mark where a sentence starts and ends, and then two medial pauses, a bit like a comma and a colon, we could maybe think of them.

The dot is so perfect for that because it's tiny.

You can just squeeze it in between words, and it doesn't take up extra space, so it was a really genius move on the sign- the side of Aristophanes.

And these dots at the different levels of the line, just to even mark the very basic shape of a sentence, that trickled into grammars and then schoolchildren started to learn about this, and so slowly, slowly, slowly we have the spread of marking at least, you know, some very basic grammar.

What comes after dots?