Česká interpunkce v evropských dějinách: reflexe, nauky, teorie – Rinas Karsten (2023)

Punctuation is something obvious in our written culture. However, its usage is not entirely straightforward. There are punctuation rules that can be understood as a specific form of linguistic analysis: it works with linguistic categories such as text and sentence, but phenomena like main and subordinate clauses, coordination... are also at play. The rules and theories they are based on vary over time and space. ***** This book describes the history and development of Czech punctuation theory in the European context from the 16th century to the present day. The dominant starting point is the ancient doctrine cultivated within rhetoric and passed down in the Latin scholarship of the Middle Ages, while also reflecting the influences of other linguistic cultures, the influence of Latin culture in the early modern period, and especially the German linguistic culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. We go through the principles of writing periods, commas, semicolons, colons, and other marks from the first grammar of Czech to the latest Rules of Czech Orthography and their interpretations with regard to the contexts of contemporary education and culture. Special attention is paid to the development of conceptual and terminological foundations, particularly the traditional rhetorical concept of the period, which has gradually been replaced by the modern concept of the sentence. ***** The book is a contribution…