Is That an Emoticon in 1862? in NYT

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

Hmmm. I see that in ancient Greek (the Odyssey, at least), there's a space before a semi-colon (the semi-colon there functioned as a question mark).
Any chance that the space before a semi-colon in English writing was in imitation of Greek?
 
Gerald Cohen

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Original message from Jonathan Lighter, Mon 1/19/2009 7:14 PM:

Joel, I think if you look closely at the databases you'll see it was  very
 common in those days to leave a space before a semicolon - or a question
mark or an exclamation mark for that matter.

<snip>

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