Towards a history of the Romanian punctuation

Abstract

In the process of constructing an academic edition for old and pre-modern texts, although they thoroughly record and comment the phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical variants of a text, its omissions and interpolations, etc., the Romanian philologists tend to deal tacitly with the problem of punctuation, by adding rational, syntactic punctuation, according to the contemporary norm. This method has certain advantages for the general public, but, in fact, falsifies the text, because it puts the actions of a secondary agent—the editor—on the author. Moreover, the lack of perfect archæological relevations of the Romanian old and pre-modern texts—which would show, in this respect, the more or less consequent working habits of our early writers—leads, at least for the moment, to the impossibility of presenting the scientific community with a history of the Romanian punctuation. This is, nevertheless, an idea whose achievement depends on an objective re-evaluation of our contemporary editorial practice.

Keywords

• text editing
• philology