Relative clauses and commas (was: Re: "certain" inThe First Noel)

[David Borowitz]

Does anyone know the history of the use of commas to set off relative
clauses in English? My hunch is it has a storied history (maybe back to
Latin or Greek?), as some languages (e.g. Spanish) seem to have rules
similar to English, whereas others (e.g. Russian) have far more obligatory
commas.


On 8/2/07, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "certain" inThe First Noel
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Aug 2, 2007, at 9:59 AM, Larry Horn wrote:
>
> > At 12:43 PM -0400 8/2/07, Mark Mandel wrote:
> >> Yup. It's a garden path sentence. The catch is that the obvious
> >> interpretation of "The first Noel", as referring to the first
> >> Christmas,
> >> doesn't work. Instead, I take it as referring to the greeting: The
> >> angels'
> >> first Christmas greeting was uttered to certain poor shepherds.
> >
> > Ah, so you and dInIs are taking it as "The first
> > Noël that the angels did say..."!  I always
> > assumed the parenthetical reading as you describe
> > it below, although as you convincingly argue this
> > is indeed hard to sustain semantically.
>
> well, the punctuation indicates a parenthetical.  unfortunately, the
> carol is old enough to have a restrictive relative ("(that) the
> angels did say") set off by commas, something we (mostly) don't do
> any more.
>
> arnold
>
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Borowitz

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