• Croatian: interpunkcija, punktuacija, razgodak
• Finnish: välimerkki
• Polish: interpunkcja przestankowanie

Punctuation is everything in written language other than the actual letters or numbers, including punctuation marks (listed at right), inter-word spaces and indentation.

Punctuation marks are symbols that correspond to neither phonemes (sounds) of a language nor to lexemes (words and phrases), but which serve to indicate the structure and organization of writing, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading it aloud. See orthography.

In English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences. For example, "woman, without her man, is nothing," and "woman: without her, man is nothing," have greatly different meanings, as do "eats shoots and leaves" and "eats, shoots and leaves."

The rules of punctuation vary with language, location, register and time, and are constantly evolving. Certain aspects of punctuation are stylistic and are thus the author's (or editor's) choice. Tachygraphic language forms, such as those used in online chat and text messages, may have wildly different rules.

History

The earliest writing had no capitalization, no spaces and no punctuation marks. This worked as long as the subject matter was restricted to a limited range of topics (for example, writing was initially used for recording business transactions). Expanding the use of writing to more abstract concepts required some way to disambiguate meanings. Until the 18th century, punctuation was principally an aid to reading aloud; after that time its development was as a mechanism for ensuring that the text made sense when read silently. for two new punctuation marks: the "question comma" and the "exclamation comma". The patent application entered the national phase in Canada only, advertised as lapsing in Australia on 27 January 1994 and in Canada on 6 November 1995 .

Unicode

Apart from the ASCII punctuation marks in its Basic Latin range

!"'()*,-./:;<>?[\]`~

Unicode has the General Punctuation (U+2000–206F) and Supplemental Punctuation (U+E000–E0FF) ranges.

References

See also

• Japanese punctuation
• Obelism, the practice of annotating manuscripts with marks set in the margins
• Scribal abbreviations, abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in Latin
• Tironian notes, a system of shorthand consisted of about 4,000 signs
• Unicode symbols, characters of symbols that have a well-defined place in plain text, in computing
• James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher., a word puzzle in which proper punctuation must be added to give the sentence meaning

Further reading