Everything about Punctuation totally explained
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
eighteenth 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.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Punctuation'.
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