The History of Punctuation Marks in Spanish

This article is devoted to the history of the evolution of punctuation marks in the Spanish language. Punctuation is one of the fundamental tools for the organization of written language. At the same time this system causes many difficulties in learning both in the mother tongue and in foreign language. Moreover, this aspect of the language system is often omitted in Russia. The authors of this article have the objective to show the stages in the development of punctuation, which emerged from the Greek interpunction and punctuation system in Latin, in the Spanish language. Basing its arguments on this assumption, the article also names the background of these changes (including extra-linguistic factors). The key moment in the history of the punctuation was the foundation of the Royal Spanish Academy that went into the codification of Spanish (Castilian) language. As a result, the punctuation norm was for the first time ever fixed and described for the whole Spanish country. For the same reason a lot of attention in the article is paid to the detailed analysis of the Orthography of the Spanish language starting with the edition of 1741 and finishing with the edition of 2010. The authors are confident that this article will be interesting for language experts, translators, teachers and for those who want to take an exam of DELE of C1 and C2 levels.

punctuation marks, Spanish punctuation, orthography, written language