Apostrophe, semi-colon, comma, parentheses, ellipses, quotation marks -- six marks and counting within 200 years. How come there is an explosion of punctuation marks in between 1400 and 1600? What were the intellectual and technological factors accounting for such a boom?
This is part 1 of part 2 of the history of punctuation -- I realized part is a long history, so there are two parts of part 2!