Talk:Chinese punctuation

Enumeration comma on a PC
Hi. How do you enter 顿号 (、) in Chinese IME? --Atitarev (talk) 21:22, 13 October 2008 (UTC)


 * On most IMEs you press "\" or "/" while you are in Chinese mode. --Voidvector (talk) 21:57, 14 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Thank you! I can type it now: 、、、It's "\" on my IME. --Atitarev (talk) 22:32, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Typing fixed width space on Mac OS X IME
Following on from the question about PC, how do you type not a normal space, but the type of space mentioned in the article, ie a chinese character width space? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 27.51.163.179 (talk) 10:28, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Mongolian
It doesn't make any sense that Mongolian is discussed in this article. Also the paragraph seems not to be aware that they use the Uighur script still in Inner-Mongolia and use most modern punctuation with it. Tibetologist (talk) 18:35, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Ambiguous Time Frame
This sentence is ambiguous. As a result, I have flagged it with the when template. Someone, please add an accurate time frame or add a source. "Chinese punctuation only became an integral part of the written language relatively recently."

XP1 (talk) 11:54, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

I hope the additional details are satisfactory; the source is the corresponding Chinese Wikipedia article. Ymwang42 (talk) 04:16, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Quotation marks
The article says that "European style" quotation marks are used in horizontal simplified Chinese. I think a better description would be "English style" because the quotation marks shown as those of English -- at the top of the line, inverted for open quote. Those are not "European" because several other forms are in use elsewhere in Europe: open quotes that look like the close quotes but at the bottom of the line in German and Dutch, and double angle brackets in French. Paul Koning (talk) 20:28, 13 April 2012 (UTC)


 * For more, see Non-English usage of quotation marks. Paul Koning (talk) 20:37, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

Wrong use for question mark
I'm a from mainland of China where we use simplified Chinese. And I'm pretty sure that question marks are not used as described in the last chapter, where,


 * ？ The question mark is used as in English, with the additional function of being used with indirect questions. Examples: "Whether he was of legal age? was the key question." "I was wondering where you went?"

No it looks strange. The correct use should be "他是否已到法定年龄是关键问题. "(Whether he was of legal age was the key question.) "我在想你去哪儿了. "(I was wondering where you went.), which is the same as in English.

Well, for the second sentence, a question mark is sometimes acceptable in conversation when you want to emphasize you are asking somebody (and the question mark now represents a rising tune), but I'm not sure if it's really correct or just a misuse.

Anyway. But in case it's different in traditional Chinese, I didn't change it directly. --Dzlot (talk) 11:49, 15 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah I haven't seen it used in the first manner either, and I do read Traditional Chinese sources at times, fwiw. Luolimao (talk) 20:17, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

Em-dash and En-dash
Currently the En-dash description says “a fullwidth en dash”. In Western typography an en-dash is not a full character width, and the example character is an em-dash (which is a full character width). Comparison: - hyphen, – en-dash, — em-dash, —— double em-dash.

- ← hyphen – ← en-dash U+2013 — ← em-dash U+2014 （佔一个字的位置：—） —— ← double em-dash （佔兩个字的位置：——）

I suspect the current “Em-dash” title should be changed to “Double em-dash” or “Two character-width line”, and the current “En-dash” title should be changed to “Em-dash”. I don’t know anything about Chinese, so can someone who does check this please? ^_^ Hope that helps!

Ref: 标点符号

--Oli Studholme (talk) 07:06, 7 December 2012 (UTC)


 * A dash that is two ems wide is called a two-em dash, at least in some circles (e.g., Chicago Manual of Style 16/e §6.90).—al12si (talk) 23:19, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Halfwidth...
One cannot really use the terms fullwidth and halfwidth in any other context than computer encoding. This article however uses the terms in the context of the history of punctuation marks, where these terms make no sense at all.

For starters, these terms refer solely to the number of bytes needed for encoding in certain pre-Unicode character sets. Roughly speaking, halfwidth = lower ASCII, fullwidth = Chinese. As it happens, many older systems were by their nature semi-fixed pitch (they used a memory mapped display with character cells) so the encoding affected the display, but this doesn't affect writing and nowadays Chinese fonts support proportional European text, and that isn't necessarily restricted to half-width characters. (I have several Chinese fonts that render the halfwidth and fullwidth alphabetical characters identically, both as proportional characters.)

A European full stop isn't halfwidth, not even visually, it just is as narrow as it is. There is no standard character cell for it to be half the width of. And even labelling the grid-aligned Chinese characters as fullwidth is a mistake, since the term fullwidth isn't a visual term, but refers to encoding instead.

(The above unsigned comment was written at 17:12, 21 January 2014‎ by someone at 82.139.81.0)


 * This is only half true. Half-width characters, when the term was invented, was in fact both visual and encoding-related. An ASCII character was half-width because it took up half the space of a CJK glyph, while a CJK glyph used two bytes and also visually double the width of ASCII characters. This simplified processing because the number of bytes in the encoding actually corresponded to the number of ems displayed on the screen.


 * Of course, this would have only meant anything for CJK encoding systems. But a CJK user would have always described a Western character set as “half width” because back in those early days everything was monospace on a grid.—al12si (talk) 23:26, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Emphasis marks
Support for emphasis marks is defined in CSS3, but seems only to be partially supported by Google Chrome so far. Example: 着重號 and 着重號. 90.196.106.93 (talk) 19:45, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

Comma
Why doesn't the normal comma have a paragraph? --2.245.250.233 (talk) 20:38, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

No spaces?
The opening line of the first section claims that older texts never use spaces in between characters. I laughed out loud. This is patently absurd to anyone who has cracked even a single Chinese text printed before the twentieth century. Sections, paragraphs, chapters, and poetry are all often delineated by spaces in various arrangements, even in haphazardly printed texts, both inside lines and as indents. They may not used in the same way as European languages, but so. (Likewise, although admittedly less prevalent, 〇. 、et cetera do find use in printed and handwritten texts. Not to mention that characters may be sized for footnotes or glosses, a la 康熙字典.)  I propose this be clarified and corrected, as it currently insinuates the fiction that literary Chinese texts are without spaces and indents. 曙䬠 - Sant&#39;owax Q&#39;ulsnas (talk) 06:16, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

Unicode encodings
It would be really helpful to provide the Unicode encodings for these symbols. At the very least I'm going to link to CJK Symbols and Punctuation. --Thnidu (talk) 19:37, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

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Middle dot encoding
A passage by  claims that the hyphenation point (U+2027) is used in place of a middle dot in Taiwan, but the linked Unicode chart does not support this. In addition, U+2027 was not mapped from CNS 11643, whereas U+00B7 and U+30FB were. Ibadibam (talk) 23:28, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

misplaced text
The paragraph in the introduction that starts: "The first was given by the Han dynasty scholar..." should in fact be at the end of Footnote A. The text makes no sense where it is. (This error seems to have been introduced by an edit using the ProveIt tool, 31 May 2021.)

2607:F010:2E9:7:E1FD:14AF:18A4:2004 (talk) 00:36, 3 November 2021 (UTC)