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Punctuation Practice in Early Modern English Scientific Writing: The Case of MS 3009 at the Wellcome Library, London

Paper · 2020 · Miriam Criado-Peña

Summary

Historical punctuation has often been treated as random scribal habit that is not worth systematic study. This paper tests that view on a single 17th-century source, the medical part of a recipe book held as MS Wellcome 3009 (W3009) and attributed mainly to Elizabeth Jacob, with additions by later hands. The author worked from a semi-diplomatic transcription, made from digitized images and a check of the original, and prepared as part of the Málaga project that compiles a corpus of scientific prose from the Early Modern English period. Occurrences were pulled out automatically with AntConc, and ambiguous cases were then sorted by hand. Each mark was described in context and assigned to the textual level where it operates: whole text, sentence or clause. The marks were also classified by function, either rhetorical (pausing) or grammatical (structural). The result is a full inventory and frequency profile. The comma dominates by a wide margin. The period is unusually rare, but when it appears it can mark large divisions such as the end of a recipe. The study adds evidence from scientific manuscripts to the debate over how Early Modern English moved from rhetorical toward grammatical punctuation.

Key points

  • Source: MS Wellcome 3009, Physicall and chyrurgicall receipts. Cookery and preserves. Six hands wrote in italic, secretary and hybrid scripts, and later additions date from 1654 to 1685. Only the medical section (ff. 17r–90r) was analysed.
  • Data: 6,907 punctuation instances in total. The comma accounts for 5,877, the virgule for 629 and the hyphen for 198. The colon, apostrophe and period (52) are much less frequent, and the semicolon and parenthesis are rare.
  • Inventory: period, comma, colon, semicolon, hyphen, apostrophe and parenthesis. The virgule appears in three forms: single slash /, double slash //, and the perioslash ./. or ./.
  • Tools and resources: AntConc 3.4.3 and the Málaga-based corpus of Early Modern English scientific prose (modernmss.uma.es). The corpus aims to provide normalized and POS-tagged text.
  • The period works at macro-textual, sentence and clause level, which suggests it served both rhetorical and grammatical purposes. One example of its macro-textual use is closing off a whole recipe.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Every punctuation mark is assigned the textual level it delimits (whole text unit, sentence, or clause), so the same symbol is not given one fixed role.
  • I2. Composite marks such as the perioslash ./. and the double slash // are counted as single units with their own functions, not as sequences of separate characters.
  • I3. Candidates are retrieved automatically by a concordancer, and human effort goes only to the occurrences that are actually ambiguous.
  • I4. Punctuation is read as possibly rhetorical (a pause) or grammatical (structure), not assumed to follow modern conventions.
  • I5. Medical recipes are described as commands that list ingredients with exact quantities, times and order of preparation.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tree): Sentence splitting and attachment of punct could predict a boundary level for each mark, so that a period ending a recipe and a period between clauses are handled differently.
  • I2 (tokens): The tokenizer in crate en could keep a list of multi-character punctuation units for older or non-standard texts, so they are not broken into misleading separate tokens.
  • I3 (learn): Silver-data pipelines could do the same, sending only cases where the witness parsers disagree to the LLM teacher or a human.
  • I4 (tree): When historical or informal text is converted or parsed, a comma should not automatically be taken as a clause boundary, and its role could be kept as an explainable feature.
  • I5 (world): Procedural texts like these are a good test of whether Mova correctly tracks measures, quantities and event order in the world of the text.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universidad de MálagaMálaga · Spain3 works · 6 citations

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksHistory · 66 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Miriam Criado-Peña. 2020. Punctuation Practice in Early Modern English Scientific Writing: The Case of MS 3009 at the Wellcome Library, London. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 61.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20205140

@article{criadopena2020punctuation,
  title = {{Punctuation Practice in Early Modern English Scientific Writing: The Case of MS 3009 at the Wellcome Library, London}},
  author = {Miriam Criado-Peña},
  journal = {Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 61},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.26754/ojs\_misc/mj.20205140},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20205140}
}

References

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