[nxb]

So punctuation is a type of musical notation for high-level meter and pitch, while the words are like the lower-level rhythm. Pitch and meter fluctuations, over the ranges of phrases and sentences, are what many spoken languages use to chunk sentences and phrases, which helps listeners disambiguate the connective structure of the words.

Quite interesting that punctuation co-evolved with musical notations. I had thought that punctuation existed prior to musical notation.

Side note: although American English speakers employ quite diverse pitch and meter patterns, e.g. more homogenous populations, as in many European countries, have extremely consistent spoken pitch and meter usage patterns over phrases and sentences.

[kbenson]

That's interesting. In English we would probably consider constant pitch and meter to be dull. Then again, I remember from Latin in college that the romans tended to play with sentence structure to put the subject at the end of the sentence, making it more suspenseful, so there are probably other language attributes that those more homogenous populations play with to introduce variety and distinguish interesting and dull speakers.