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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 β€œbang”) 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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14 minutes

Last on

Fri 6 May 2022 22:45

Broadcast

  • Fri 6 May 2022 22:45

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