In fact, the words "comma, period, bracket, pause" used today were already produced in the Han Dynasty, and Xu Shen's Shuo Wen Jie Zi in the Eastern Han Dynasty interpreted "pause" as "knowing but not stopping". The explanation of "extension number ()" is "hook identification". "
Archaeological findings show that besides the symbol "=", there are symbols such as ■, ●, "w", ∞ and ""in Juyan bamboo slips, which all play the role of reading sentences or punctuation in the later period. For example, Han bamboo slips "swallow the North Tunnel and die in the field (this is a calligraphy symbol). Eat it three times in the first month ∽ take it yourself in the first month ="; "□□□□ Flat ● Loss of goods ● Fire □□"; In the 27th exploration team of Broken City, three soldiers died in the 29th tunnel on the right and 30 soldiers died on the right. "Sliding Rong ∠ Wang Yang ∠ Lu Shang ∠ Han Shou □" and so on.
These special symbols in Han bamboo slips have their special uses, and some of them play the role of "later", such as "●"; Some play the role of ",",such as "▲", "∣", ∞ "and so on; Some play the role of a full stop, such as "Yi"; Others play the role of identifying chapter heads, branches and paragraphs, such as "W" and "■" placed at the beginning of the text; Some symbols, such as "∽", "s", "▓", = "and so on. It is still difficult to determine what role they play in writing; Some symbols are used together, and some symbols placed at the end of the text, such as "w", are specially used to express their particularity when copying or writing.
By the Song, Yuan and Ming Dynasties, the use of "punctuation marks" had been standardized.
After the founding of New China, the original punctuation has been repeatedly studied and sorted out. There are 16 kinds of punctuation, including comma, period, bracket, pause, semicolon, quotation mark, colon, question mark, exclamation mark, dash, ellipsis, hyphen, interval, proper name, title and bullet.