Were there punctuation marks in ancient times? If so, what are they?

The earliest ancient books in China have no punctuation marks. About the Han Dynasty, the sentence of reading (fighting) began to be used. Generally speaking, the big pause after the meaning is finished is called "sentence", and the one that needs a short pause before the meaning is finished is called "reading" The song dynasty used circles. Where the period is equivalent, the dot (,) is used where the comma is equivalent. In the Ming dynasty, it appeared again. But it is not perfect and has not been widely used for a long time.

In the 20th century, the use of modern vernacular Chinese became more and more extensive, and people urgently needed relatively complete new punctuation marks. Some scholars began to introduce some of the most popular punctuation marks in Europe and America into China, and based on the ancient sentence-reading symbols and referring to the western methods, they studied the earliest new punctuation marks in China that met the needs of China.

After the founding of our country, the original punctuation marks were studied and sorted out. 195 1 In September, the Ministry of Publishing of the Central People's Government published Usage of Punctuation. * * * There are fourteen kinds of punctuation marks, including periods, commas, pauses, semicolons, quotation marks, colons, question marks, exclamation points, brackets, dashes and ellipsis.

In 1960s, the writing of China's manuscripts and the layout of publications changed from vertical to horizontal, and the usage of some punctuation marks also developed and changed, so it is necessary to sort out the original regulations. At the beginning of 1987, the State Language Commission set up a punctuation usage revision group, and invited experts to revise the original usage 1990.50089.000000000606 The State Language Commission and the Press and Publication Administration jointly issued the revised punctuation usage, listing 16 punctuation symbols, adding hyphens and spaces. After listening to the opinions from all walks of life, the State Language Committee, the Press and Publication Administration and the State Bureau of Technical Supervision jointly decided to use punctuation as a national standard, which was formally implemented on June 25th.