Chinese punctuation


Chinese punctuation uses a different set of punctuation marks from European languages and has shapes that are derived from both Western and Chinese sources. Although there was a long native tradition of textual annotation to indicate the boundaries of sentences and clauses, the concept of punctuation marks being a mandatory and integral part of the text was only adapted in the written language during the 20th century due to Western influence. Before that, the concept of punctuation in Chinese literature existed mainly in the form of judou, a system of annotations denoting stops and pauses. However, unlike modern punctuation, judou marks were added into a text by scholars to aid comprehension and for pedagogical purposes and were not viewed as an integral part of the text. Classical texts were therefore generally transmitted without judou. In most cases, this did not interfere with the interpretation of a text, although there were occasionally ambiguous passages as a result of this practice.
The first book to be printed with modern punctuation was Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy by Hu Shih, published in 1919. Traditional poetry and calligraphy maintains the punctuation-free style. However, most editions of classical texts published since the 1930s are punctuated with fully modern punctuation. The usage of punctuation is regulated by the Chinese national standard GB/T 15834–2011 "General rules for punctuation".

Shape of punctuation marks

Many ancient Chinese books contain thousands of words with no spaces between them; however, when necessary to explicitly denote a pause or break, Judou marks such as "" and "" were used. Similar to the development of punctuation in Europe, there were varying types of Judou marks. For instance, a Song Dynasty print of Chronicles of Huayang used full-width spaces to denote a stop, whereas a print of Jingdian Shiwen from the same dynasty simply used "。" and "、" marks. Also, Qu Yuan's Li Sao used the character and grammatical particles to denote stops, similar to Judou marks. In Chinese writing, each character conforms to a roughly square frame so that the text as a whole can fit into a grid. Because of this, East Asian punctuation marks are larger than their European counterparts, as they should 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 European punctuation marks.
Chinese characters can be written horizontally or vertically. Some punctuation marks adapt to this change in direction: the parentheses, square brackets, square quotation marks, book title marks, ellipsis marks, and dashes all rotate 90° clockwise when used in vertical text. The three underline-like punctuation marks in Chinese rotate and shift to the left side of the text in vertical script.

Marks similar to European punctuation

Marks imported from Europe are fullwidth instead of halfwidth like their original European counterparts, thus incorporating more space, and no longer need to be followed by additional space in typesetting:
Other punctuation symbols are more different, in shape or usage:

Punctuation marks

; Full stop
; Quotation marks
park, which, if we reproduce enumeration commas in English, can be rendered nearly word-for-word as: "It is strictly forbidden to pick flowers、 fruit、 leaves, dig out roots、 medicinal plants!"
; Enumeration comma
; Middle dot
; Title marks
; Ellipsis
; Em dash
; En dash
; Wavy dash
; Spacing

Typographic styles

The following are commonly suggested typographical styles; however, they are rarely carried out in practice, often only used when necessary. Proper name marks and title marks are used mainly in textbooks and official documents in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan.
; Proper name mark
; Title mark
; Emphasis mark

Apostrophe

There is no equivalent of the apostrophe in Chinese. It is omitted in translated foreign names such as "O'Neill". The hyphen is only used when writing translated foreign names with hyphens. Otherwise, it is not used in Chinese and omitted when translating compound words.

Use of punctuation marks

Several punctuation marks have ranges of use that differ from the way they are used in English, though some functions may overlap.