Punctuation
Punctuation
PL/I
Category="Diacritics"Category="Punctuation"Punctuation marks are written symbols that do not correspond to either phonemes (sounds) of a spoken language nor to lexemes (words and phrases) of a written language, but which serve to organize or clarify written language. See Orthography.
The rules of what punctuation marks should be used in what circumstances vary with language, location and time. The rules are constantly evolving and certain aspects of punctuation are style - the author's choice. An English language bibliography may be found at the end of this article.Commonly used punctuation marks
Some common examples used by English and other languages using the Roman alphabet are listed below (with their Unicode preferred names, where appropriate).
Because of the limited number of characters available in ASCII, many of these punctuation characters have also been given specialized meanings in computer programs composed on ASCII keyboards. The dot and commercial at in E-mail addresses are examples of this kind of use. See the individual articles.
The individual articles listed below include information on use and misuse in English and provide examples:
- apostrophe ( ' ), ( ' )
- bracket - i.e., parentheses (aka round brackets) (
(, )), square brackets ([, ]), curly brackets (aka braces) ({, }), and angle brackets (〈, 〉) - colon (
:) - comma (
,) - Dash - i.e., figure dash(
‒), en dash (-), em dash (-), and quotation dash (―) - Ellipsis or suspension points (
...) - Exclamation mark (
!) (aka bang) - Full stop or period (
.) - Hyphen (
-), (‐) - Interrobang (
‽) (symbol resembles a question mark laid over an exclamation mark) - Question mark (
?) - quotation marks (British English: inverted commas) and guillemets (
'; ', '; "; ","; ‹, ›) - Semicolon (
;) - slash or solidus (
/) - space between words to provide Interword separation. Because the interword space has no mark, it is arguably not a "written symbol", but it clearly serves to organize and clarify Latin script writings.
The following typographical symbols or glyphs are not true punctuation marks:
Also related are diacritical marks (or diacritics), which serve to distinguish among similar sounds using the same primary letter symbol, or to clarify emphasis or tone.
Each script, and each language within a script, can have its own set of punctuation marks and usage conventions.
Chinese and Japanese use a different set of punctuation marks from Western languages. These only came into use relatively recently, the ancient forms of these languages having no punctuation at all. Traditional poetry and calligraphy maintains this punctuation-free style.Nearly all of the punctuation marks used are larger than their Western counterparts, and occupy a square area that is the same size as the characters around them. These punctuation marks are called "fullwidth" to contrast them from "halfwidth" Western punctuation marks.
Japanese and Traditional Chinese can be written both horizontally and vertically. See Yokogaki and tategaki for the Japanese case. Simplified Chinese is rarely written vertically. Some punctuation marks adapt to this change in direction: the parentheses, curved brackets, square quotation marks (Japanese and Traditional Chinese), book title marks (Chinese), ellipsis mark, dash, and wavy dash (Japanese) all rotate themselves 90 degrees when used in vertical rather than horizontal text. The three Underline-like punctuation marks in Chinese (proper noun mark, wavy book title mark, and emphasis mark) rotate and shift to the left side of the text in vertical script.
Major differences between Western and Chinese/Japanese punctuation marks include:
- Some punctuation marks are similar in use to their equivalent Western ones. The only difference is in size: they are fullwidth instead of halfwidth:
- Other punctuation marks are more different, whether in shape or usage:
- The Chinese and Japanese Full stop is a fullwidth small circle (。). In horizontally-written Japanese the full stop is placed in the same position as it would be in English; in vertical writing it is placed below and to the right of the last Character. In Chinese the full stop is always after the last character.
- In Japanese and Traditional Chinese, the double and single quotation marks are fullwidth 『 』 and 「 」. The double quotation marks are used when embedded within single quotation marks: 「...『...』...」.
- In Traditional Chinese, Western-style quotation marks, “” and ‘’ can also be used for horizontal texts. In Simplified Chinese, only the Western-style quotation marks are used. Here, the single quotation marks are used when embedded within double quotation marks: “...‘...’...”. These quotation marks are fullwidth in printed matter, but share the same codepoints as the Western quotation marks in Unicode, so they require a Chinese-language font to be displayed correctly.
- In Chinese, the fullwidth comma (，) has the same shape as the Western comma. In Japanese, the fullwidth comma (、) is shaped like a teardrop with the narrow sharp end pointing top-left and round end pointing bottom-right; it may be depicted on your computer in another font.
- Chinese also has a repetition comma, which must be used instead of the regular comma when separating words constituting a list. It is identical to the Japanese fullwidth comma (、). In Japanese, either the regular fullwidth comma (、) or a fullwidth middle dot (・) is used for this purpose.
- Both Chinese and Japanese use a Middle dot to separate words in a foreign name, since native first and last names in Chinese or Japanese are not separated using any punctuation or spaces. For example, "Leonardo da Vinci" in Simplified Chinese: "列奥纳多·达·芬奇", in Japanese: "レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチ". Japanese always uses the fullwidth middle dot (・). In Chinese, the middle dot is also fullwidth in printed matter, but the halfwidth middle dot (·) is used in computer input, which is then rendered as fullwidth in Chinese-language fonts.
- For emphasis, Chinese and Japanese use emphasis marks instead of Italic type. Each emphasis mark is a single dot (in Chinese) or dash (in Japanese) placed under each character to be emphasized (for vertical text, the dot is placed to the left hand side of each character). Although frequent in printed matter, emphasis marks are rare online, as they are inconvenient to input. In Japanese, these emphasis marks are called bōten or wakiten.
- For book titles, Chinese uses fullwidth double book title marks, 《 book title》, and fullwidth single book title marks, 〈book title）. The latter is used only when embedded within the former: 《...〈...〉...》. In Japanese, book titles are marked out using double quotation marks 『 』. (Italic type is never used in Chinese or Japanese.)
- A proper noun mark (an Underline) is occasionally used in Chinese, such in teaching materials and some movie subtitles. For consistency in style, a wavy underline (﹏﹏) is used instead of the regular book title marks whenever the proper noun mark is used in the same text. When the text runs vertically, the proper name mark is written as a line to the left of the characters.
- In Chinese, the Ellipsis is written with six dots (not three) occupying the same space as two characters (……) in the center of the line. Similarly, the Dash is written so that it occupies the space of two characters (——) in the center of the line. There should be no breaking in the line.
- When connecting two words to signify a range, Chinese generally uses a fullwidth dash occupying the space of one character (—, e.g. 1月—7月 "January to July"), while Japanese generally uses a fullwidth wavy dash occupying the space of one character (～, e.g. 1月～7月 "January to July").
- Whilst Western languages use a narrow space between each letter, and a wider space between words, Chinese and Japanese use a narrow space both between characters and between words. In this way it somewhat resembles the Scriptio continua of Ancient Greek and Latin.
- There are a small number of exceptions. In Japanese, a fullwidth space is often used where a colon or comma would be used in English: 大和銀行 大阪支店 (Yamato Bank, Osaka Branch). The fullwidth space is extremely rare in Chinese: one example, found in Taiwan, is that of referring to Chiang Kai-shek as 先總統 蔣公 (Late President, Lord Chiang), where the space corresponds to the comma. However, this practice is no longer popular.
- Also, when Chinese is written entirely in Hanyu Pinyin or when Japanese is written entirely in Kana, spaces are always introduced to assist in reading.
- There is no equivalent of the apostrophe in Chinese or Japanese.
- See also Iteration mark for Japanese repetition marks.
Korean, the third member language of CJK, currently uses Western punctuation.
Like Classical Chinese, traditional Mongolian employed no punctuation at all. But now, as it uses the Cyrillic alphabet, its punctuations are similar, if not identical, to Russian.
Other scripts
In ancient forms of Roman script, the Interpunct served to separate words.Ethiopian languages, including Amharic, Tigrinya, Ge'ez, and Afaan Oromo, make use of the following punctuation marks:
- comma (resembles an English colon)
- sentence end (resembles four dots at the corners of an imaginary square)
- colon (resembels an English colon with two small horizontal lines, one above and one below)
- semicolon (resembles an English colon with a small horizontal line between the dots)
- preface colon (resembles an English colon with a small horizontal line between the dots but more to the right than in the semicolon)
- question mark (three dots in a vertical line)
- paragraph separator (seven dots: three in a vertical line flanked by two vertical lines of two dots each, appearing as the corners of a hexagon with a dot in the center)
See also Ethiopic Script.
Oringinally Sanskrit had no punctuation. In the 1600s+, Sanskrit and Marathi, both written in DevNagri script, used the vertical bar (|) to end a line of a verse and double vertical bars (