Language Notation

Human language has only recently appeared on the surfaces of things. For tens of thousands of years it only used to exist in our mouths and ears—whether whispered or shouted, mumbled or sung. At its deepest, primal level, human language is about sound and feel. It is not the alphabet or spelling—that’s just notation. Nuance has to be carefully designed into sentences that are drawn on a page or rendered to a screen rather than spoken. Without the breath to convey the complexity of emotion and energy—without that river to carry words along—there is much that simply sinks out of sight.

But we invented punctuation, too: further elaborating on our notation to try to convey the information in spoken language. But they are only symbols—approximations—and never spoken. Or at least they didn’t used to be spoken until we started dictating into our phones to create text.

Which, of course, is the perfect exercise to help you realize just how awkward and unnatural punctuation is.