Pause for Thought
From a Tudor letter to texting - how has the use of punctuation marks developed over the centuries? Florence Hazrat thinks about the way brackets help us understand the pandemic.
From full stops to emojis, a Tudor letter to texting - how has the use of punctuation marks developed over the centuries? Florence Hazrat thinks about the way brackets help us understand the pandemic. The first parentheses appear in a 1399 manuscript by the Italian lawyer Coluccio Salutati, but - as her essay outlines - it took over 500 years for the sign born at the same time as the bracket, the exclamation mark (which printers rather aptly call βbangβ) to find its true environment: the internet.
Florence Hazrat is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Sheffield. She is a 2021 New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year to turn their research into radio.
Producer: Robyn Read
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- Fri 6 May 2022 22:45ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 3
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