A Punctuation World Tour!

Commas, semicolons, and question marks (oh my).

(Some of the text on this post got scrambled when this e-mail got was first sent out. It has since been edited slightly to accommodate mobile users reading through the Substack App. Enjoy!)

Although I grew up speaking Mandarin as a child (and grudgingly attended Chinese school until I complained so much that my mom let me quit), reading and writing was never my strong suit. So when I finally had a change of heart and realized that I should probably learn Mandarin for real this time, there were a lot of little quirks about writing Chinese that took me extra long to figure out.

During my second year learning Chinese in a university context, I had a sudden epiphany. I was reading a passage in our textbook with my classmates when I clocked something I had never noticed before. I blurted out, “OH MY GOD! Chinese has two commas?!”

Titus Andromedon = me

Of course, to my chagrin, everyone had learned this in Chinese 101 and I clearly just never got the memo. While my classmates looked on blankly, I frantically flipped through other reading passages in the textbook only to find that — Yes! Chinese! Has! Two! Commas!

Why had I never noticed them before? Why had no one told me? Why do two of them exist?

Am I going to start adding GIFs from all my favorite shows to this newsletter? Probably.

It turns out that one comma is meant more for lists (called an enumeration comma, or 頓號 dùnhào), while the other is used to separate clauses (which is a more typical comma, called 逗號 dòuhào). Here’s an example:

今天我買了水果、牛奶、和麵包。 (Today I bought fruit, milk, and bread.)

我們先去買東西，再去喝咖啡。(Let’s go shopping first, then go drink coffee.)

There are a few more Chinese punctuation things that differ from English. For example, while in English, you might underline or italicize the title of a book or movie, in Chinese you use a handy little punctuation mark called a title mark (書名號 shūmínghào). So if you wanted to talk about my favorite movie from last year, it would look something like this:《 Everything Everywhere All At Once 》。

As written language is a fairly recent innovation, punctuation is even more so — and languages often differ in which ones they use & how they use them. In fact, the aforementioned “title mark” is also known as guillemets, and are used for quotations «like this» in a bunch of languages, including French, Persian, Khmer, and many more.

Below are three more fun uses of punctuation marks from languages around the world (plus a bonus one that you might consider adding to your own repertoire).

Arabic

Along with Persian, Urdu, and Uyghur, Arabic uses a mirrored question mark as compared to the Latin question mark. This logically follows the nature of Arabic script, as it’s written from right to left. Can you find it below?

Interestingly, while Hebrew and Yiddish are also written from right to left, they use the Latin question mark in an un-mirrored fashion, like this:

From what I can find, the origin of the Latin question mark’s shape as we know it now is a little unclear. So maybe in the end, it’s all a matter of perspective when it comes to who is really mirroring whom.

Thai

What makes Thai punctuation special? The fact that upon first glance, there isn’t a whole lot of it! While some punctuation marks like commas and periods have wiggled their way into modern Thai, spaces are a more common way to represent both minor and major pauses.

For example, the following is Genesis 1:1 in Thai script (which, in the English NIV version, would read: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”) —

ในปฐมกาล พระเจ้าทรงสร้างทุกสิ่งในฟ้าสวรรค์และโลก

There are a few other punctuation marks that are used as well, such as quotation marks, which are seen in Genesis 1:3 (“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”). Can you spot them below?

และพระเจ้าตรัสว่า “จงเกิดความสว่าง” ความสว่างก็เกิดขึ้น

Additionally, Thai boasts a few punctuation marks that have more of a literary function. Here are some highlights:

• ๚ะ — marks the end of a stanza in a poem

• ๛ — marks the end of a story, chapter, or document

• ๚ะ๛ — marks the VERY end of a written work

Greek

Another question-related punctuation feature comes from Greek — specifically, their use of το ερωτηματικό (to erotimatiko) as a question mark, which English readers may recognize as a semicolon (;). So if you made a Greek-speaking friend online, you might receive a message like this:

Πώς σε λένε; (pós se léne?) — “What’s your name?”

This might cause some readers to wonder: how do modern Greek users write a semicolon? In Greek, a semicolon moment is represented by η άνω τελεία (i ano teleia), which looks like this: (·) Learners of Greek, be on the lookout!

Bonus: The Future?

Over the decades, some brave individuals have attempted to create their own punctuation marks with the hope of having them enter the mainstream. While successes are few and far between, one punctuation mark that piqued my interest is the SarcMark™.

Created by Douglas Sak in 2006, the SarcMark is intended to help indicate when a sentence is actually sarcasm. An example from the official SarcMark website reads, “It must be tough being perfect,” followed by this symbol:

While a symbol like this might seem unnecessary, internet users (particularly on Reddit) have actually started using something similar to the SarcMark to denote sarcasm: (/s). That being said, it seems like even Redditors have a love-hate relationship with the tag. Understandably, some users feel that marking a sentence as sarcasm defeats the purpose of it in the first place. But others enjoy offering it at the end of statements just to make sure their meaning is explicitly understood (especially as speech can be easily taken out of context and misconstrued).

Have you seen (/s) or the SarcMark floating around the Internet? If the SarcMark speaks to you to the extent that you want to incorporate it into your writing, you can download plugins with the SarcMark through their official website here.

Thanks for reading!

This is just a brief picture of a few of the ways that punctuation is used in languages around the world. I would love to hear even more examples from languages that you’ve studied or speak as well. Is there a funky symbol that you’re just itching to talk about? Share your favorites in the comments below!

Hope you enjoyed this week’s newsletter, and I’ll see you next Tuesday!