Chinese punctuation


Writing systems that use Chinese characters also include various punctuation marks, derived from both Chinese and Western sources. Historically, jùdòu annotations were often used to indicate the boundaries of sentences and clauses in text. The use of punctuation in written Chinese only became mandatory during the 20th century, due to Western influence. Unlike modern punctuation, judou marks were added by scholars for pedagogical purposes and were not viewed as integral to the text. Texts were therefore generally transmitted without judou. In most cases, this practice did not interfere with the interpretation of a text, although it occasionally resulted in ambiguity.
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 in China 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 period simply used "。" and "、" marks. Qu Yuan's Li Sao used the character and grammatical particles to denote stops, similar to judou marks.
In Written Chinese, each character conforms to a roughly square frame, so the entire text 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 an additional space in typesetting:

Other punctuation

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

Punctuation marks

; Period
; Quotation marks
; Enumeration comma
; Middle dot
; Title marks
; Ellipsis
; Two-em dash
; En dash
; Wave dash
; Spacing
; Asterisk

Typographic styles

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

Apostrophe

There is no equivalent of the apostrophe in Chinese. Therefore, it is omitted in translated foreign names such as "O'Neill". Likewise, the hyphen is used only when writing translated foreign names with hyphens. Otherwise, it is not used in Chinese and is 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.
  • ， The comma is used to join clauses that deal with a certain topic or line of thinking. As such, what would appear to an English speaker to be a comma splice is very commonly seen in Chinese writing. Often, the entirety of a long paragraph can consist of clauses joined by commas, with the sole period coming only at the end. Unlike in English, a comma is allowed between a subject and its predicate.
  • ； The semicolon is frequently used to demarcate parallel structures in a paragraph.
  • 「...」 Quotation marks, in addition to being used around quotations, are also commonly used for emphasis and to indicate proper nouns and titles, and also to enclose metaphors that do not explicitly state it is a metaphor.
  • — — The use of a second em dash to close a parenthetical thought is rare. Instead, a comma is usually used, or sometimes no punctuation at all.
  • In Pinyin, the apostrophe is before a syllable starting with a vowel in a multiple-syllable word when the syllable does not start the word. It is commonly thought that this apostrophe should be used when there could be ambiguity regarding the syllables used.