英语词汇comma的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

comma; colon; period. Before they became common terms used for punctuation, these words were the names of elements of sentence structure. A comma was a short phrase or clause, a colon a long phrase, and a period two or more colons. Period, for example, was recorded as early as 1533 for a sentence of several clauses, almost a century before it meant the point or character that marks the end of such a sentence. Has anyone written a book about periods, those at the end of sentences? I don’t know, but an entire book (Hendrik Hertzberg’s One Mil- lion, 1980) is filled with dots, which might loosely be consid- ered periods. Periods are not always the last thing in a sentence; for example, a sentence ending with a quoted word must have its period inside the quotation marks. Christopher Marlowe wrote of all poetry distilled into “one poem’s period,” but the period’s great lover in literary history was Russian author Isaac Babel. Babel, murdered by Soviet secret police in 1939, wrote: “No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.” In Scandinavian author Gustav Wiel’s novel Knagsted (1902), one of his eponymous character’s creations is a full-length book collection of Danish writers’ commas. The most costly grammatical error in history occurred when the U.S. space probe Mariner 1, bound for Venus, headed off course and had to be destroyed at a cost of $18.5 million. The rocket responded erratically because an anonymous flight computer programmer left out a comma from Mariner’s computer pro- gram. See hyphen; punctuation.

词汇	comma
词源	comma; colon; period. Before they became common terms used for punctuation, these words were the names of elements of sentence structure. A comma was a short phrase or clause, a colon a long phrase, and a period two or more colons. Period, for example, was recorded as early as 1533 for a sentence of several clauses, almost a century before it meant the point or character that marks the end of such a sentence. Has anyone written a book about periods, those at the end of sentences? I don’t know, but an entire book (Hendrik Hertzberg’s One Mil- lion, 1980) is filled with dots, which might loosely be consid- ered periods. Periods are not always the last thing in a sentence; for example, a sentence ending with a quoted word must have its period inside the quotation marks. Christopher Marlowe wrote of all poetry distilled into “one poem’s period,” but the period’s great lover in literary history was Russian author Isaac Babel. Babel, murdered by Soviet secret police in 1939, wrote: “No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.” In Scandinavian author Gustav Wiel’s novel Knagsted (1902), one of his eponymous character’s creations is a full-length book collection of Danish writers’ commas. The most costly grammatical error in history occurred when the U.S. space probe Mariner 1, bound for Venus, headed off course and had to be destroyed at a cost of $18.5 million. The rocket responded erratically because an anonymous flight computer programmer left out a comma from Mariner’s computer pro- gram. See hyphen; punctuation.
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