origin of ? and !

[anthony_barker]

I assume that ? and ! came into chinese recently (I have never seen any old scrolls with this punctuation).

Anyone know the history of how they crept in?

[jukebox]

There're no punctuations in Chinese written form (namely Classical Chinese/Literary Chinese) in ancient times. The capability to 断句 (know where to pause when reading) is a must for scholars at that time and it's not so hard because patterns of sentences are strictly defined. ...者...也, however, is such a pattern.

句读 (ju4dou4) were later invented to punctuate sentences, but they were mainly used for kids when learning and teaching.

读号 (、) as comma for short break and was changed into '，' during Tang or Song dynasty.

句号 (。) as full stop for longer break

Puctuation marks in western languages came into use in Chinese relatively recently, accompanied by 白话文运动 during the beginning of the 20th century.

However, IMHO ? are ! are kinda not necessary for Chinese thanks to those numerous modal particles (啊/呀/哇/吗/么/etc. in modern Chinese and 耶/哉/矣/乎/etc. in classical Chinese). In Japanese, question and exclamation marks are actually rarely used though they are introduced.

[WangLongju]

.

According to 吴邦驹 , in his 《最新标点符号用法》 (1996),

　　标点符号在我国已有 80 多年历史。现已从 1919 年的 12 种增加到 1990 年 3 月发布的 16 种。尽管高考语文分数中标点符号占 6 分左右，但有的学校对标点符号的教学仍多作软任务。 (p. 1)

and

　　标点符号在我国从无到有，从少到多，从简到繁，已有 80 多年历史。 (p. 3)

Wu goes on to write:

我国第一个从国外引进标点符号的是清末同文馆的第一批学生张德彝 (1847–1919) 。同文馆是为清朝政府培养外事人员的。他在同文馆受了“西化”教育后，就从事翻译、外交工作。⋯⋯

　　到了清代晚期，严复评《富原》等开始用地名、人名号。 1897 年广东东莞人王炳耀草拟了“，”“。”等 10 种标点符号未通用。 1904 年，商务印书馆出版了《英文汉诂》，最早使用外国标点符号。 1909 年鲁迅与周作人翻译出版的《域外小说集》引进使用了多种标点符号。以后语言学家陈望道又全面系统引进了标点符号， 1918 年 5 月他在《学习》杂志上发表了《标点之革新》，介绍了西洋 10 种标点符号。

　　1918 年 5 月起，《新青年》杂志第四卷第一期起就全部使用白话文排印并加了新式标点符号。从此，标点符号很快风靡全国，不到半年就有四百多种报刊试用。 (pp. 4-5)

Generally speaking, no punctuation until around 1900. Punctuation now counts for a certain percentage of the College Entrance Exam.

Basically the timeline is:

1897　first draft of "," and "." and 8 other types of punctuation.

1904　first use of foreign punctuation in publication.

1909　Lu Xun / Zhou Zuoren used many types of punctuation.

1918　introduction of 10 kinds of punctuation

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