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Concept
Chinese punctuation
Summary
Chinese punctuation has punctuation marks that are derived from both Chinese and Western sources. Although there was a long native tradition of textual annotation to indicate the boundaries of sentences and clauses, the concept of punctuation marks being a mandatory and integral part of the text was only adapted in the written language during the 20th century due to Western influence.
Before that, the concept of punctuation in Chinese literature existed mainly in the form of judou (), a system of annotations denoting stops and pauses.
However, unlike modern punctuation, judou marks were added into a text by scholars to aid comprehension and for pedagogical purposes; they were not viewed as an integral part of the text. Classical texts were therefore generally transmitted without judou. In most cases, this did not interfere with the interpretation of a text, although there were occasionally ambiguous passages as a result of this practice.
The first book to be printed with modern punctuation was Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy (中國哲學史大綱) by Hu Shih (胡適), published in 1919. Traditional poetry and calligraphy maintains the punctuation-free style. However, most editions of classical texts published since the 1930s are punctuated with fully modern punctuation (or at least using the modern equivalents of the traditional judou marks).
The usage of punctuation is regulated by the Chinese national standard GB/T 15834–2011 "General rules for punctuation" ().
Many ancient Chinese books contain thousands of words with no spaces between them; however, when necessary to explicitly denote a pause or break, Judou marks such as "" and "" were used.
Similar to the development of punctuation in Europe, there were varying types of Judou marks. For instance, a Song Dynasty print of Chronicles of Huayang used full-width spaces to denote a stop, whereas a print of Jingdian Shiwen from the same dynasty simply used "。" and "、" marks.
Also, Qu Yuan's Li Sao used the character 兮 and grammatical particles to denote stops, similar to Judou marks.
Official source
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