The Origins of Punctuation Marks

The ancient Greeks also didn't use punctuation. There were no spaces between words, so words flowed into each other. Eventually the Greeks began to place a short mark under the first word in a line where a new thought or idea was being expressed. The apostrophe was used by the Greeks to indicate that a vowel had been dropped before or after another vowel. And the comma, the period, and colon all come from Greek as well.