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Chinese punctuation

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Chinese punctuation uses a different set of punctuation marks from European languages. They only became an integral part of the written language relatively recently. Scholars did, however, annotate texts with symbols resembling the modern '。' and '、' (see below) to indicate full-stops and pauses, respectively. Traditional poetry and calligraphy maintains the punctuation-free style.

Nearly all East Asian punctuation marks are larger than their European 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 European punctuation marks.

Chinese characters can be written horizontally or vertically. Some punctuation marks adapt to this change in direction: the parentheses, curved brackets, square quotation marks (Traditional Chinese), book title marks (Chinese), ellipsis mark and dash all rotate 90° clockwise when used in vertical 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 (shifting to the right side of the text is also possible, but this is outmoded and can clash with the placement of other punctuation marks).

There are major differences between European and Chinese punctuation marks.

Marks similar to European punctuation

Marks imported from Europe differ in size: they are fullwidth instead of halfwidth:

Other punctuation marks

Other punctuation marks are more different, in shape or usage:

Punctuations

Full stop
The Chinese full stop is a fullwidth small circle (。), called 句号 (jùhào). In horizontal writing, 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.
Quotation marks
In Traditional Chinese, the double and single quotation marks are fullwidth 『 』 and 「 」. The double quotation marks are used when embedded within single quotation marks: 「...『...』...」. European-style quotation marks “” and ‘’ can also be used for horizontal text.
In Simplified Chinese, the European-style quotation marks are used. Here, the single quotation marks are used when embedded within double quotation marks: [“…‘…’…”] Error: {{Lang}}: Latn text/non-Latn script subtag mismatch (help). These quotation marks are fullwidth in printed matter but share the same codepoints as the European quotation marks in Unicode, so they require a Chinese-language font to be displayed correctly. Bracket-like quotations are used in vertical writing.
Enumeration comma
Chinese also has the enumeration comma (simplified Chinese: 顿号; traditional Chinese: 頓號; pinyin: dùnhào; lit. 'pause mark'), which must be used instead of the regular comma when separating words constituting a list. It is identical in appearance to the Japanese fullwidth comma (、). Chinese language does not observe the English custom of serial comma (extra comma before "and" or "or" in a list).
Middle dot
Chinese uses a middle dot to separate words in a foreign name, since native first and last names in Chinese are not separated using any punctuation or spaces. For example, "Leonardo da Vinci" in Simplified Chinese: "列奥纳多·达·芬奇". In Chinese, the middle dot is also fullwidth in printed matter, but the halfwidth middle dot ([·] Error: {{Lang}}: Latn text/non-Latn script subtag mismatch (help)) is used in computer input, which is then rendered as fullwidth in Chinese-language fonts.
Book title marks
For book titles, Chinese uses fullwidth double book title marks, 《book title》, and fullwidth single book title marks, 〈book title〉. The latter is used when embedded within the former: 《...〈...〉...》; in Traditional Chinese, the latter is also used for articles in or sections of a book.
Ellipsis
In Chinese, the ellipsis is written with six dots (not three) occupying the same space as two characters ([……] Error: {{Lang}}: Latn text/non-Latn script subtag mismatch (help)) in the center of the line.
Em dash
Similarly, the em dash is written so that it occupies the space of two characters ([——] Error: {{Lang}}: Latn text/non-Latn script subtag mismatch (help)) in the center of the line. There should be no breaking in the line.
En dash
When connecting two words to signify a range, Chinese generally uses a fullwidth en dash occupying the space of one character (—, e.g. 1月—7月 "January to July"). The wavy dash (～, e.g. 5～20个字) is also frequently used for the same purpose in Chinese, it is more commonly used when the numbers are estimates (i.e. circa dates).
Spacing
While European languages use a narrow space between each letter, and a wider space between words, Chinese does not observe the latter. In this aspect, it somewhat resembles the scriptio continua of ancient Greek and Latin.
There are a small number of exceptions. A modern example, found in Taiwan, is that of referring to Chiang Kai-shek as 先總統　蔣公 (Former President, Lord Chiang), where the space is an honorific marker for 蔣公; this use is also still current in very formal letters or other old-style documents.
Also, when Chinese is written entirely in Hanyu Pinyin, spaces are always introduced to assist in reading.

Typographic styles

The following are commonly suggested typographical styles; however, they are rarely carried out in practice, often only used when necessary.

Proper noun mark
A proper noun mark (an underline) is occasionally used in Chinese, such as 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 (to the right in some older books).
Emphasis mark
For emphasis, Chinese uses emphasis marks instead of italic type. Each emphasis mark is a single dot 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 cannot be represented as plain text, are not supported by HTML and most word processors, and otherwise inconvenient to input.

Other notes

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.

Mongolian Punctuation

Like Classical Chinese, traditional Mongolian employed no punctuation at all. But now, as it uses the Cyrillic alphabet, its punctuation is similar, if not identical, to Russian.

See also

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