Do ancient Chinese characters have punctuation?

Nowadays, many people mistakenly think that the ancient Chinese did not use "punctuation marks" because the Qing Dynasty officially presided over the compilation of the "Siku Quanshu", and removed the original "punctuation marks" in China. Qing literati also no longer used "punctuation" when writing articles or publishing books, until modern new punctuation marks were produced.

In fact, the "comma, period, parentheses, and ton" used today have been produced in the Han Dynasty, and Xu Shen's "Shuowen Jiezi" in the Eastern Han Dynasty interprets "ton" as "there is an end, and there is also knowledge". Interpret "expansion ()" as "hook recognition also." “

Archaeological findings show that in addition to the symbol "=" in the Juyan Han Jian, there are also symbols such as "w" and "卩", which all play the role of sentence reading or later punctuation. For example: Han Jian "Swallow North Tunnel Pawn Tian Yun (this is a Zhu pen symbol) New Year Moon Eclipse Three Hu New Year Gengxu Self-Pick = 卩"; "Pingwu lost the goods and lost the fire has been fired" in the 27th square of the broken city, there are "three right twenty-ninth tunnel pawns", and thirty right pawns"; "Slant Rong Wang Yang Lu Shang Han Shou" and so on.

These special symbols in the Chinese Simplified Chinese have their own special uses, some of them play the role of later, such as " and some play, such as " and " and so on; Some play the role of a full stop, such as "卩"; Some play the role of identifying the front of the chapter or the branch and the paragraph, such as the "w", "and other symbols" placed at the beginning of the text; Some symbols, such as "s", "=", etc., are not yet yet able to determine exactly what their role is in the text; Some of them are used in conjunction with two symbols, and some symbols such as "w" are placed at the end of the text, and they are deliberately used in Zhu handwriting to indicate their particularity when copying or writing.

By the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties, the use of "punctuation" had been relatively standardized.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the original punctuation marks were studied and sorted out many times, and a total of 16 kinds of punctuation marks were listed, including commas, periods, parentheses, pauses, semicolons, quotation marks, colons, question marks, exclamation marks, dashes, ellipses, conjunctions, spacers, proper names, book titles, and accents.

In ancient China, there were no punctuation marks at the earliest, but later there was a sentence reading, that is, a dot or a circle was drawn at the end of each sentence, and the names of people and places were drawn on the left side, and the punctuation marks were imported from abroad after the New Culture Movement.

Ancient texts are punctuated without punctuation and read from right to left; There are also those that are read from top to bottom.

Punctuation analysis, after reading it, you are not easy to use it wrong.

In ancient Chinese texts, punctuation marks are generally not added, but sentences are broken through the sense of language, mood particles, grammatical structures, etc. (add "sentence reading jù dòu symbol" in the text: a full stop indicates the end of the sentence; The reading number looks like the current pause, indicating a pause in tone), often ambiguous, resulting in misunderstanding of the words and sentences of the article;

For example, in the Qing Dynasty poet Zhao Tianyang's "Revised Interpretation of the New Collection of Interpreting People", there are seven ways to interpret the sentence "Stay a guest on a rainy day, leave me without a stay" (another says that I am a guest, not me).

There is no such invention.

In ancient Chinese texts, punctuation marks are generally not added, but sentences are broken through the sense of language, mood particles, grammatical structures, etc.;

But in fact, there have been punctuation marks in China since the pre-Qin period, which can be seen in archaeological artifacts from the 20th century onwards, but there is no unified standard for these symbols.

On February 2, 1920, the Ministry of Education of Beiyang ** issued Instruction No. 53 - "General Order Adopts New Punctuation Text", and China's first set of legal new punctuation marks was born.

It is often said that "punctuation should be followed by a colon"; It usually indicates a pause after the prompt or indicates a prompt below or in general.

The role of the colon:

It is used after the salutation to indicate the following. For example: "Comrades: now we have a meeting. It often appears in letters and official documents. Some people often ignore the colon after the salutation and tend to write it as a comma.

It is used after the words "say", "think", "is", "prove", "announce", "for example", "as follows", etc., to indicate the following. The role of the colon:

1. After the salutation used in letters and speeches, it means that the following is mentioned.

2. It is used after the speaker's name in the records of interviews, debates, discussions, court hearings, etc., to elicit the content of the speech.

3. After the use of suggestive words, it means mentioning the following.

Fourth, it is used to lead to sub-statements after the general discourse.

In ancient times, there were only symbols for pauses in sentences and sentences, and there were no punctuation marks in the real sense.

Around the Han Dynasty, sentence reading was used, but that was only a pause, not yet punctuation. A large pause that is roughly the end of the semantic meaning is called a "sentence", and a pause that requires a slight pause before the semantic end is called a "reading". In the Song Dynasty, circle points began to be used.

Use a circle where it's a full stop and a dot where it's a comma. In the Ming Dynasty, and , it was used to indicate the name of a person and a place, respectively. These simple symbols can be seen as traditional punctuation marks in our country; But it is very incomplete and has not been widely used for a long time.

In the 20th century, the use of modern vernacular was becoming more and more extensive, and there was an urgent need for a relatively complete new punctuation mark. Some scholars began to introduce some of the most common punctuation marks in Europe and the United States to China, and based on the ancient sentence reading symbols, with reference to Western methods, they formulated the earliest new punctuation marks in China that are suitable for the needs of Chinese characters.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the relevant parties studied and sorted out the original punctuation, and in September 1951, the People's Publishing Office published the "Punctuation Usage". There are 14 kinds of punctuation marks, including periods, commas, pauses, semicolons, quotation marks, colons, question marks, exclamation marks, parentheses, dashes, ellipsis, proper names, book titles, and emphasis.