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 Eur...
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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, book title marks, ellipsis mark and dash all rotate 90° clockwise when used in vertical text. The three underline-like punctuation marks in Chinese (proper noun mark,...
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