Making a Point Read Online Free Page B

placed at different heights – would mark pauses of different lengths. An interesting development was a mark like an acute accent placed on top of a diastole, so that the result looked a bit like a modern semicolon.
    Distinguishing between major and minor pauses is probably enough if you are reading silently and simply need some help to see where one unit of sense ends and another begins. But if you are reading aloud, you need more than this. And in the Anglo-Saxon period, reading aloud once again became a priority – at monastery meal-times, and in church.

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    No question: we need it
    It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of reading aloud in the liturgy of the church. In Catholic Christianity of the time, the ‘liturgy of the Word’ ranked alongside the ‘liturgy of the Eucharist’ – as indeed it still does. The role of the lector was vital. Passages from scripture were read aloud during Mass – and for virtually all of the congregation outside of the monastery it would be the only way in which they would ever encounter the message of the Bible, as they were unable to read it for themselves. Within the monastery, reading the daily office and listening to spiritual reading were routine. Chapter 38 of the Rule of St Benedict (written in the sixth century AD) makes this very clear:
Reading must not be wanting at the table of the brethren when they are eating. …
    Let the deepest silence be maintained that no whispering or voice be heard except that of the reader alone. …
    The brethren will not read or sing in order, but only those who edify the hearers.
    Only good readers, note. Make a mistake, and you were in trouble, as Benedict goes on to say in Chapter 45:
If anyone whilst he reciteth a psalm, a responsory, an antiphon, or a lesson, maketh a mistake, and doth nothumble himself there before all by making satisfaction, let him undergo a greater punishment, because he would not correct by humility what he did amiss through negligence.
    In such a climate, anything which would help your reading to come across well would be highly valued.
    Punctuation was seen to be one of these valuable aids. The influential eighth-century monk–scholar Alcuin, working at the court of Emperor Charlemagne, and writing in Latin, says in one of his poems (No. 94) that scribes need to pay careful attention to it when copying works to be used in the liturgy:
let them put those relevant marks of punctuation in their proper order, so that the lector may neither read mistakenly, nor by chance suddenly fall silent before the holy brothers in church.
    But what did ‘read mistakenly’ mean? It was not only a matter of knowing where to breathe, pausing between sentences, or emphasizing the right words. It was everything to do with a powerful oral delivery, in which the reader would bring out the meaning of a text, proclaiming it with emotional conviction (so that it might reach the hearts and minds of the listeners) and giving it an appropriate rhythm (so that elements of it might be more easily remembered). This demanded the use of more reliable and meaningful punctuation marks.
    These new marks, increasingly seen from the end of the eighth century, are often referred to by the Latin name positurae , ‘positions’. The distinction between a middle and a final pause was made in a more systematic way, and began to be linked with the grammar of a sentence. Paleographers have developed a terminology for talking about these.
A punctus versus , or ‘turned point’, marked the end of a statement, signalling a major break and thus arelatively long pause. It would be heard typically as a falling intonation. It looked somewhat like a modern semicolon, with its tail usually dangling below the line of writing. An example is shown on p. 12, where it ends the first line of the manuscript. Later, this would be replaced by the point (or full stop , or period ) as the primary way of showing