In Ancient Greek rhetoric, a comma (κόμμα ''komma'', plural κόμματα ''kommata'') is a short
clause
In language, a clause is a constituent that comprises a semantic predicand (expressed or not) and a semantic predicate. A typical clause consists of a subject and a syntactic predicate, the latter typically a verb phrase composed of a verb with ...
, something less than a
colon.
In the system of
Aristophanes of Byzantium
__NOTOC__
Aristophanes of Byzantium ( grc-gre, Ἀριστοφάνης ὁ Βυζάντιος ; BC) was a Hellenistic Greek scholar, critic and grammarian, particularly renowned for his work in Homeric scholarship, but also for work on other ...
, commata were separated by middle
interpunct
An interpunct , also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot and centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in ancient Latin script. (Word-separating spaces did no ...
s.
In antiquity, a comma was defined as a combination of words that has no more than eight syllables.
References
* http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Figures/C/comma.htm Part of
glossary of classical rhetorical terms
Bibliography
* Bruce M. Metzger, Bart D. Ehrman, ''The Text of the New Testament. Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration'', New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 45–46.
* Toivo Viljamaa, "Colon and comma: Dionysius of Halicarnassus on the sentence structure", pp. 163–178 in P. Swiggers, A. Wouters (eds.), ''Syntax in Antiquity'' , 2003
Rhetoric
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