Chinese punctuation uses a slightly different set of punctuation marks from European languages, but they serve similar purposes and often look a like.
At Gongjin's Campaign Memorials you will find Chinese punctuation marks in our copies of Records of the Three Kingdoms, Book of the Later Han and other historical works.
It should be noted that these Chinese punctuation marks became an integral part of written language since the last century. Thus, the original copies of the aforementioned works did not contain any punctuation marks. The punctation marks were added by later historians or scholars. We've also added some ourselves (mainly book marks 《》).
| Chinese | European | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 。 | . | full stop. Used in the same way as the European full stop. |
| · | middle dot. Used to separate words in a foreign name. For example 'Joost van den Vondel' in Mandarin is 約斯特·范·登·馮德爾. The middle dot is also used to separate an article from a magazine or book (三國志·蜀書). | |
| ， | , | |
| 、 | enumeration comma. | |
| ！ | ! | |
| ？ | ? | |
| ； | ; | |
| ： | : | |
| （ ） | ( ) | |
| 【 】 | [ ] | |
| 「 ... 」 | “ ... ” | quotation marks |
| 『 ... 』 | quotation marks. Usually these thicker quotation marks are used to mark quotations within a quotation. (王曰：「『施于有政，是亦為政』。若天命在吾，吾為周文王矣。」 ) | |
| ﹁ ... ﹂ | horizontal quotation marks. Used in vertically written Chinese texts. | |
| 《 ... 》 | Book marks. Used to mark titles of books, comics, movies, tv series, etcetera. |