Chinese punctuation

Chinese punctuation uses a different set of punctuation marks from European languages, although the concept of modern standard punctuation was adapted in the written language during the 20th century from Western punctuation marks. Before that, the concept of punctuation in Chinese literature existed mainly in the form of Judou, a system of punctuation marks denoting stops and pauses, though many works of poetry and prose, as well as nearly all calligraphic works, omitted Judou marks, for in most occasions, it was not necessary to understanding meaning. 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 Shi (胡適), published in 1919. Traditional poetry and calligraphy maintains the punctuation-free style. The usage of punctuation is regulated by the Chinese national standard GB/T 15834–2011 "General rules for punctuation" (Chinese: 標點符號用法; pinyin: biāodiǎn fúhào yòngfǎ).

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 and grammatical particles to denote stops, similar to Judou marks. In Chinese writing, each character conforms to a roughly square frame so that the text as a whole can fit into a grid. Because of this, marks are larger than their European counterparts, as they should occupy a square area that is the same size as the characters around them. These punctuation marks are called fullwidth to contrast them from halfwidth European punctuation marks.

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