That is, the articles written by the ancients are all sentences without punctuation marks, and the articles are connected together. It is inconvenient for future generations (people before the invention of punctuation marks) to read these articles, and they often have to interrupt the sentences of the articles with their own pens in order to better understand them. This method is called "sentence reading".
Now sentence reading can also be interpreted as some so-called experts translating ancient Chinese, and punctuation marks are always confused. For example, Lu Xun said, "Punctuating ancient Chinese not only embarrassed students who took the exam, but also often made famous scholars make a fool of themselves. The beautiful talk of confusing lyrics and breaking up parallel prose has become a thing of the past and there is no need to review it. " Lu Xun also said sentence reading.
In which generation did the sentence of reading classics used by the ancients appear?
It first appeared in the Han Dynasty.
China's ancient books have no punctuation marks similar to those used today. In ancient times, some words (such as Oracle Bone Inscriptions) sometimes used lines or isolation to indicate pauses, which was not common. Therefore, it has always been considered that learning to punctuate sentences is the basic requirement of reading. The symbols used in the Han Dynasty to express sentence breaks are ","and "?" . ","is used to indicate a small pause, "?" It means a big pause. This symbol was used in some simple fragments of the Han bamboo slips "The Slip of Quicksand" discovered in the early 20th century. "?" And Han called it sentence reading. These two symbols were gradually popularized and used in the Song Dynasty, but their forms changed. One is to read the number with "."and ","; The other is to read the period with the same dot, with the dot of the period next to the word and the dot of the number between two words. Books published in Song and Yuan Dynasties, especially Confucian classics, are generally read without sentences. Reading sentence symbols are mostly used for teaching or collating. There are also copies of proofreading books in Song dynasty, but it is rare.
Most of the novels in Yuan and Ming Dynasties are circled at the end of sentences, and some of them use ","or ". Yes Some operas and enlightenment books also use this method. In addition, the Ming Dynasty added names of people and places. The former is to add a straight line to the right of the name, and the latter is to add two straight lines to the right of the place name.
Punctuation, the word, first appeared in the Song Dynasty. "History of Song Dynasty He Ji Chuan": "Everything you read is punctuated, meaning is clear, and there are people who don't have to say it." Punctuation here refers to the sentence reading symbols added when reading ancient books, that is, the so-called old-fashioned punctuation.
The history of punctuation marks in China can be traced back to the lines and spaces used as word segmentation in Oracle Bone Inscriptions. Lin believes that punctuation in a narrow sense refers to written punctuation, while punctuation in a broad sense should also include non-written punctuation, such as spaces, capitalization, segmentation and so on. And take non-written punctuation as the research object. At least from the pre-Qin dynasty to the Han dynasty, tick marks have been used to break sentences. Shuowen Jiezi has officially listed ""and ""as entries. They are paired and are sentence reading symbols in early Chinese. Then it introduces the punctuation marks in the Tang Dynasty and the Diamond Sutra, the punctuation marks from the Song Dynasty to the middle of Qing Dynasty, the punctuation marks from the late Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, and even the usage of punctuation marks in New China, which is a concise and systematic history of punctuation marks. Sentence reading is a traditional punctuation mark in China, so "Sentence reading and punctuation mark" was set up in the first article for special discussion.
Western punctuation marks originated in ancient Greece. Zhu Lin said that in the 5th century BC, Greek inscriptions were written in words, and only occasionally words were separated by two consecutive points and three consecutive points. The great scholar Aristotle (384-322 BC) mentioned in Rhetoric that the works of the philosopher Heraclitus (540-470 BC) are difficult to break sentences because of continuous writing. Zhu Lin pointed out that the founder of the western new punctuation system was Italian jurist and publisher A Manutius (about 1450 ~ 15 15). He used grammar principle instead of reading principle, and made five kinds of printed punctuation marks: comma (,) and semicolon (; ), colon (:), period (. ) and question mark (? )。 His family published nearly a thousand books in a hundred years and sold them all over Europe. These basic punctuation marks are widely used in various languages. European languages gradually formed their own punctuation system, and English punctuation was not completed until the late18th century.
For thousands of years, the development and changes of punctuation marks in Chinese and some western languages are very different, and from a macro perspective, they also have similar trajectories. That is, through the connection of words, words and sentences, punctuation or non-punctuation is gradually used to break words and sentences; Different regions, different viewpoints and different schools use different punctuation marks, and gradually seek common ground while reserving differences by putting aside differences, and adopt a unified or basically unified punctuation system within a language.
What is intriguing is that human beings have created splendid civilizations in ancient times, but it is difficult to create a few punctuation marks. China created the Oracle Bone Inscriptions in the Yin and Shang Dynasties, and the unearthed Oracle bones have about 4,500 words (about one third of which are recognizable). Xu Shen's Shuo Wen Jie Zi in the Eastern Han Dynasty collected 9 353 seal characters. From then until the late Qing Dynasty, there was only one sentence (. ), read (,), to emphasize (. ), which means proper noun (-), and so on. , and these punctuation marks are often mixed with other symbols, such as comment symbols. It was not until 12 that Beiyang * * * Ministry of Education published the Proposal for Promulgating a New Punctuation Law that it became a series of punctuation marks.
Ancient Greek civilization is dazzling. Around the 5th century BC, a large number of philosophers emerged, leaving a lot of literature on philosophy, history, literature and natural science for later generations. However, it was not until the Hellenistic era that aristophanes (257 BC-65438 BC+08 BC), the director of the Alexandria Library, was appointed. ......