A grammar of grammar

Are we writing a new chapter right now?

I’ve always lived on the sharp edge of grammar — I understand its import and want to use it correctly, but I also find some of the rules arbitrary and hard to remember. I tend to edit by gut, which is fine in personal or creative writing, but may not be productive in business writing. So when I recently got to work on upgrading Textio’s grammar-detection feature, it was fun and satisfying work for a word nerd such as myself. Along the way I found myself starting to question what we mean by the word “grammar,” and how it all came about.

When we talk about grammar what we usually mean is syntax — the formulas by which we assemble language to write “properly.” More broadly though, grammar is a set of rules that we, culturally, have defined over time, in order to come to a commonly agreed upon understanding of how best to communicate with each other.

Like with any ruleset, there is an implication of rightness and wrongness — that there are rules that you can learn and follow, and by doing so you can proof the language theorem. Which means, if there is right and wrong, somewhere is a person, or body of people, who help define what those rules are in the first place. Perhaps, also, what the punishment for not learning them should be.

Grammar is a shorthand, then, for education. “Are you in the learned group?” If a person on Twitter seeks to undermine another’s argument, commenting that they used improper grammar is a popular shorthand for “you don’t have to listen to this person, because they are uneducated on the most basic of things.”

That feels like a terrible motivation to elicit desire in people to want to write well. There is certainly a homeroom-teacher lesson for cultural boundaries, to “use grammar well or others will discount you,” but such an argument sounds like how you convince unbelievers that grammar is important, not why you might create grammar in the first place.

The word “grammar“ derivated from the Greek phrase γραμματικὴ τέχνη, which translates to “the art of letters”. The derivation of the first word in that sentence is γράμμα, or “gramma”, and is also the root of graphics, photograph, and grapheme. As a designer who is obsessed with typography and letters, finding out that my love of grammar was syntactically tied to them as fruits of the same linguistic tree was very satisfying.

Indeed, the Greeks had many thoughts on grammar. One of the earliest published treatises on the subject was The Art of Grammar, from the 2nd century BC, assumed to be written by Dionysius Thrax.

“Grammar is an experimental knowledge of the uses of language as generally current among poets and prose writers” he wrote (as translated in the 19th century by Thomas Davidson). The pamphlet covers all the Greek letters, the parts of speech, and even has a section “On Reading”, by which he means reading aloud, or performing, a poem.

There are elements of how we think about grammar today, such as punctuation and the rules that govern them. Here’s what Thrax had to say, under the heading On Punctuation:

“There are three punctuation marks: the full stop, the semi-colon, and the comma. The full stop denotes that the sense is complete; the semicolon is a sign of where to take breath; the comma shows that the sense is not yet complete, but that something further must be added.”

Which is followed by “Wherein Does The Full Stop Differ From the Comma?”

The answer? “In time. At the full stop the pause is long, at the comma, very short.”

It is not surprising that Thrax is talking about recitation — we think of grammar primarily for communicating with the written word, but the focus on Greek grammar was to allow proper speaking of poetry.

Before printing sprang from Mainz in 1455, the creators of books were mostly monks in the scriptoriums. Because writing books by hand was expensive (they mostly wrote on vellum, or heavily processed calfskin, and raising animals to use their hides for all of your writing is not very efficient), and also laborious and difficult (monks sometimes complained in the marginalia. “Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides” wrote one scribe who obviously questioned their career choice), monks used shorthand wherever they could.

Writing mostly in Latin, early manuscripts had words jammed together: “In late antiquity, books were written with all letters equally spaced, effectively meaning that there were no spaces to indicate where one word ended and another began. Words were separated by reading the text aloud.” Writes Richard M. Pollard, on a site from UCLA dedicated to manuscripts from the monasteries at Reichenau and St. Gall.

Later monks did separate words, except short words such as Latin prepositions that were joined. They also used abbreviations and ligatures, and oddly to our modern eyes, they used capitols at the tops of pages or sections sometimes, but none in the regular text. They also used center dots instead of paragraph breaks, giving most manuscripts even margins and dense text.

When they did use punctuation, they differed from ours. One scribe added their own punctuation to the Gutenberg Bible — a mark that resembles a small 7, called the “flexa”, from “punctus circumflexus”, was added by hand to the copy now kept at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The flexa was used to indicate a long pause — so, like Thrax sixteen centuries earlier, the punctuation was to aid in recitation.

Because books were extremely expensive and rare, as was literacy, a monk writing a manuscript could assume that the only reader of the manuscript were other scholars. The marginalia, the compression of writing, all of it makes sense when considering that legibility was not a primary concern.

So when did punctuation become focused on the reading of documents? When did books start resembling something a modern reader might recognize without much trouble? It happened when books became cheaper to make, therefore cheaper to buy, and more accessible to a larger population.

1455 is when the Gutenberg Bible was printed. William Caxton, who was the first printer to translate works into English, decided to learn the new skill of printing after trying to write a manuscript and his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed.” After studying in Germany, he opened his press at Westminster in 1476.

But nobody had printed in English before, which meant there was no standard on which of the many regional dialects to rely on. Like many inventions that have had outsized cultural impacts, many of the rules for spelling and grammar in English we have today are because that’s how Caxton (and his successor, the delightfully named Wykyn de Worde) thought they should be. For example, it’s because of Caxton that eggs are called “eggs” and not “eyren”.

What did Caxton use for punctuation? He used three marks: the stroke (/), the colon, and the period, or as it was known until more recently, the full stop.

But Caxton’s works would remind a modern eye more of Gutenberg’s than a book you could pick off the shelf at your local bookshop. The type was all textura, or blackletter. It was in Italy, around the turn of the 16th century, that printers such as Aldus Manutius took the uncial forms that some monks used in their texts, and combined them with roman capitols, to make text that looks like the typeface you’re reading this in now. With these newer letterforms came work on the design of punctuation that is considerably more like we’re used to, today.

Manutius, in fact, published grammars of his own, essentially teaching people how to use the books he printed. Grammar, in some ways, was the killer app of early books — instead of needing scholarship to read books, since different scribes from different schools or regions would use different typefaces and methods of punctuation, all one needed was exposure. You could pick up a copy of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and, assuming you could read the Latin it was written in, you could read it as easily as you could the latest J.A. Jance novel, despite being published 520 years apart.

I was writing in Textio today and saw a grammatical issue being called out with Textio’s new bright red underline. English grammar has today become codified and universal enough that we can create a fairly immutable set of rules that can be applied through software to any writing surface. In the age of the internet, though, the acceptable patterns of things like punctuation are changing almost daily, especially for casual uses like social media. We also have a tighter feedback cycle on how that change is reviewed and either accepted or rejected, culturally. No doubt, some of these new patterns will become regarded as “proper” writing over time. Right now, we may be writing the first new chapter that the book of grammar has seen in a long time.