First, the initial stage of production
Chinese characters are written symbols for recording Chinese, which have recorded the history of our Chinese nation for more than 5,000 years. But there are no punctuation marks in ancient written materials. Because there are no punctuation marks, there will be different understandings of the same paragraph, and even the opposite result will appear. Due to the need of language expression, punctuation marks are gradually produced.
In the Han Dynasty, some people used the method of "retaining classics" to break words. The Book of Rites compiled by Dai Sheng in the Western Han Dynasty said, "Enter the school in the next year, take the exam in middle age, and read the classics and distinguish the records in one year". Zheng Xuan's Note: "You can't break sentences without classics." . At that time, people often marked "し" beside sentences when reading. As a reading aid symbol. This is the bud of punctuation. In the Song Dynasty, people used dots to mark characters. It's called sentence reading (sound reading, short pause in ancient Chinese sentences). That is, adding a ","at the end of the sentence is similar to the current comma, and drawing a "at the end of the whole sentence has the same role as the current period. In the Ming Dynasty, with the appearance of published novels, two special figures were added, namely, drawing a single straight line next to the names of people and a double straight line next to the ground.
Second, the mature stage of development.
The emergence and development of punctuation has gone through a long historical process, from scratch, from less to more, and gradually enriched and improved. As for the popularization and use of punctuation marks, it was before the May 4th Movement. Especially after the May 4th Movement and the New Culture Movement, the older generation of proletarian revolutionaries played an important role in the development and popularization of punctuation marks. Especially in the first period of cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, the * * * production party helped the Kuomintang to restore and establish secretarial work in terms of manpower, material resources and technical work, helped the secretary reform, and began to use punctuation marks. 1On April 4th, 924, the minutes of the 21st meeting of the Executive Committee of the Kuomintang recorded that the meeting passed a motion on punctuation of official documents, that is, a motion on punctuation of official documents and books printed by the Party. Since then, punctuation marks have been frequently used in the writing of Kuomintang organs. This is the first time that the government has come forward to stipulate the use of punctuation marks. The second time was found in the documents of the People's Government of the Liberated Area, that is, the Interim Provisions of the People's Government of North China, which was formulated in February 1949, stipulated that all official documents should be punctuated. At that time, it was stipulated that the punctuation mark 1 1 should be generally used. That is, comma (,), pause (,), semicolon (; ), colon (:), single quotation mark (""), double quotation mark (""), ellipsis (...), bracket (), (? ), exclamation point (! ), period (. )。 These are some common punctuation marks. Governments at all levels must use punctuation marks whether they write up and down or in parallel. Punctuation marks have matured at this point.
Third, the stage of stereotype popularization.
The popularization stage of punctuation marks can be said to be after the founding of the People's Republic of China. 1951September, the publishing department of the central people's government promulgated the measures for the use of punctuation marks. At that time, when it was published, it was stipulated that 14 species: period (. ), question mark (? ), exclamation point (! ), comma (,), pause (,), semicolon (; ), colon (:), bracket (), quotation mark (), dash (-), ellipsis (…), bullet (), title (), special number (-).
Fourth, improve the improvement stage.
After more than 30 years of practical application, writing and typesetting have changed from straight to horizontal. The usage of punctuation marks has also undergone some development and changes. In this regard, in March 1990, the State Language Committee and the Press and Publication Administration revised and published the usage of punctuation marks. The original 14 was changed to 16, and two kinds of connection number (-) and separation number (-) were added. With the development of time, people have created several writing symbols: the ending symbol (O) or (□), which is used at the end of an article. More common in magazines. These new writing symbols have been established and widely used. This marks the continuous enrichment and improvement of punctuation marks.
Were there punctuation marks in ancient China? The mainstream view is no. But there are also different opinions, saying that there is. For a long time, most of us have been influenced by the "nothing" school, and we have found or inferred the reason for "nothing": ancient Chinese characters are too precious. This is not unreasonable. You think, whether it is early bamboo slips, wooden slips or later fabrics, it is not easy to process. The space on bamboo and silk can naturally be saved. Write one more word if you can, so punctuation takes up space, which is not cost-effective.
You can't help but listen to the opinions of the "you" faction, because it's not completely unreasonable. Some experts pointed out that the history of punctuation marks in China can be traced back to the era of Oracle Bone Inscriptions. In Oracle Bone Inscriptions, writers use lines and spaces as a means of word segmentation. Punctuation in a narrow sense refers to punctuation with a clear writing form, and punctuation in a broad sense should also include ways without writing form, such as spaces, paragraphs and so on. In the Han dynasty, "sentence reading" was used as a pause sign, which is similar to our sentence breaking today. There are two kinds of symbols: ↓ and ",". For example, in Shuo Wen Jie Zi, ↓ is interpreted as "knowing, living in the moon", and "yes" means "stopping, while knowing is also the master of cotangent". That is to say, all the places that can be stopped at the end of the sentence are marked with "↓", and all the places that can be read in the sentence are marked with ",",which is today's period and comma. Interestingly, Xu Shen attached great importance to these two punctuation marks, and put them into the dictionary as words to make them tangible, sound and meaningful. In the Song Dynasty, the hook became a circle with the shape of "○", which was divided into three types: large, medium and small. When Zhu wrote Notes on Four Books, he used a big "○" before each chapter and a small "○" after each sentence. During this period, paragraph numbers also appeared, which were indicated by "∨" or "∧" and were drawn in the lower right corner of the last word of each paragraph, and even appeared. " . . . . . Add "..." to the right of the word to emphasize the wonderful part of the sentence. As for the vertical lines drawn next to people's names or place names, they did not appear until the Ming Dynasty.
Accordingly, Chinese punctuation has also lasted for thousands of years. How can you say there are no punctuation marks? The conceivable explanation is that although these punctuation marks emerge one after another, the scope of implementation is too small and not popular enough, and most books still have no punctuation marks. One more thing, I have to mention, is that punctuation marks such as "sentence reading" have not been made by the author himself for a long time, but by the reader while reading. It's hard to say whether this mark is random or not. As a punctuation mark, it was not produced synchronously with the work, but was later "appended" by readers, and different readers can have their own ways of appending. This peculiar way of separating works from punctuation marks may be a unique landscape in all kinds of words in the world. Like Zhu, few people consciously use punctuation marks when writing books.
In this case, it is not appropriate to simply judge whether there were punctuation marks in ancient China. Accurately speaking, as early as Oracle Bone Inscriptions's time, punctuation marks had sprouted, and the writing practice of using punctuation marks had already existed, but it was late to standardize and systematize. The most systematic and complete use and popularization of punctuation marks is after the introduction and digestion of punctuation marks in western languages.
Recently, I read an American article about punctuation (see Youth Reference, April 7, 2009), and learned that foreigners invented punctuation at first for the convenience of reading (it seems that it was not because writing materials such as cowhide and sheepskin suddenly became cheap at that time). An American named Ursula Dubos said that the word punctuation in English comes from the Latin punctus, which means "dot". These "points" let readers know where to pause, where to emphasize and so on. This fundamentally subverts our long-standing explanation of why our ancestors didn't use punctuation very much. It can be speculated that whether people in the East or in the West used punctuation earlier, it was because it was not invented, and it had little to do with whether the written materials were precious or not. Some scholars wonder that the shape of punctuation marks is far simpler than that of words, and the number is far less than that of words. Why can text be made a long time ago, but systematic punctuation is late? So is the East, and so is the West.
It is said that in the 5th century BC, the ancient Greek characters were written consecutively, without punctuation marks. Aristotle, a great scholar at that time, mentioned in his book Rhetoric that the works of the philosopher Heraclitus were difficult to break sentences because of continuous writing. Later, aristophanes (257 BC ~ 65438 BC+080 BC), the director of Alexandria Library, created three-level dot numbers: middle point, upper point and lower point. From scratch, gradually into a sequence.
As the founder of western new punctuation system, Italian jurist and publisher A. Manuti (about 1450 ~ 15 15). He used grammar principle instead of reading principle, and formulated five kinds of printing punctuation: comma (,) and semicolon (; ), colon (:), period (. ) and question mark (? )。 Why can punctuation marks formulated by Mahalanobis be popularized? In addition to readers' reading needs, it also has a lot to do with his family being a large publishing house. This family published nearly a thousand books in a hundred years (a large number at that time). If all these books are published with horse punctuation, this punctuation is certainly easy to popularize. Since then, European languages have gradually formed their own punctuation system. As for punctuation marks in several major European languages, it was not until the end of 18 and the beginning of the 20th century that they were finalized.
After the Opium War, punctuation in western languages attracted the attention of China people. The first person who introduced punctuation marks from abroad was Zhang Deyi, a student of Wentong Museum in the late Qing Dynasty. Wentong Pavilion was established by the Qing government to train foreign language talents in the Westernization Movement. Zhang Deyi is one of the first students in the English class. In February of the seventh year of Tongzhi (1868), the retired ambassador to China Pu led the "China Mission" to visit Europe and America and became a member of the delegation. Zhang Deyi has a habit, that is, no matter which country you go to, you like to record the local scenery, famous things, local customs and make a booklet in the name of "telling anecdotes". During the period of 1868- 1869, he finished "Talking Strange Words". This book is now called Travels in Europe and America, and there is a passage introducing western punctuation, saying, "Books in western countries in Thailand are very annoying to read and outline. If this sentence is meaningful enough, remember "."; If you are not satisfied, remember','; Although the meaning is not enough, the meaning is bonded with the previous sentence, remember';' ; If the meaning is not enough, add a sentence outside, and then write ":"; If you are surprised and admired, please remember "!" ; If you ask a question, remember? ; Quote the classics and write'' at the beginning of the sentence; Add a note, write' ()' before and after the sentence; Add a cross at the junction of these two paragraphs, just like-. "
Since then, the west wind has spread eastward, and western languages have become more and more familiar to China intellectuals. The convenience of punctuation has always inspired everyone's enthusiasm for reform. Translator Yan Fu's Annotations to English (1904) is the earliest work in China that uses foreign punctuation marks. A few years before the May 4th Movement, many writers began to use new punctuation marks. Mr Chen Wangdao, a rhetorician, has played a positive role in promoting the application of new punctuation marks. 19 18 published the article "innovation of punctuation marks" in Yi Xue magazine in May, and introduced 10 kinds of western punctuation marks. Since May of the same year, New Youth magazine has all used vernacular typography and new punctuation. It had a great influence, and more than 400 newspapers and periodicals followed up in less than half a year. Because the publications at that time were mostly arranged in a straight line, users made "Chinese-style" adjustments to varying degrees. 19 19 in April, six professors, including Qian, Zhou Zuoren and Ma Yuzao, headed by Hu Shi, asked the government to issue passports at the first meeting of the preparatory meeting for the unification of Mandarin. ; :? ! -() ""Equipunctuation scheme. 165438+1At the end of October, Hu Shi modified the above scheme and named the symbols listed in the original scheme as "new punctuation marks", which was adopted the following year. This motion first explains the necessity of using punctuation marks, and then lists various symbols, including periods, periods, semicolons, colons, question marks, exclamation marks, quotation marks, dashes, ellipsis, brackets, private names, and book titles *** 12.
After the founding of New China, the General Administration of Publishing of the Central People's Government published the usage of punctuation marks, 195 1, including the symbol 14. In March l990, the State Language Committee and the Press and Publication Administration jointly issued the revised Usage of Punctuation Symbols, which increased to 16 symbols, including 7 kinds of periods (period, question mark, exclamation point, comma, pause, semicolon and colon) and 9 kinds of labels (quotation marks, brackets, dashes, ellipsis, bullets and hyphens). Subsequently, it was partially revised and approved as a national standard by the State Bureau of Technical Supervision in February 1995, commonly known as the national standard "Punctuation Usage", which requires all organs to process documents, publish newspapers and periodicals, and teachers and students in schools to use punctuation correctly and normatively in the process of teaching and learning, so as to express the language accurately and vividly.
It is worth mentioning that China people have also dealt with the punctuation marks with "China characteristics". There are several obvious differences with punctuation marks used in the west: ① Use ""as a full stop. Don't ".". This circle has been used by China people for many years. Familiar and eye-catching, much better than the dots in western languages. ② Use ""and ""in quotation marks instead of ""and "". This is to adapt to the characteristics of vertical text. Time has passed, with the vast majority of Chinese characters lying across, quotation marks and western languages converge. (3) The names and place names of proper nouns in western languages are indicated by capital letters at the beginning, while Chinese characters have no such marks, and they must have names and titles. In addition, there are also differences between them: Chinese dashes occupy the position of two Chinese characters, while English dashes only occupy the position of about one Chinese character; Chinese ellipsis is six connecting points (also called "two groups of three connecting points") in the middle, while English ellipsis has only three connecting points (namely "one group of three connecting points") below; Chinese hyphens can be divided into "long horizontal" (-), "one-line" (-), "half-line" (-) and "wavy pattern" (~). The first three characters occupy the positions of two Chinese characters, one Chinese character and half a Chinese character respectively, while the English hyphen only occupies1/3 (–) of the width of the letter m, wait a minute.
Some punctuation marks in Chinese are not found in English, such as pause, dot, interval, book title, proper name and so on. In Chinese-English translation, pause is often regarded as a comma; Bullets are emphasized in Chinese, and when translated into English, the emphasized parts are often expressed in italics or bold; The interval number of China is used for the names of foreigners or some ethnic minorities. In English, because spaces are directly used to separate the parts of a person's name, there is no need for space symbols; When Chinese book titles are translated into English, only the corresponding parts are italicized; Chinese proper names are used under names of people, places and dynasties. They only appear in ancient books or some literature and history works, and no symbols are used in the same situation in English.