Generally, ancient books have no sentences (only a few woodcut books have sentences in the Song Dynasty), and people who read books often read them until they can fully understand the article, so the ancients attached great importance to the training of reading sentences. There is a saying in the Book of Rites: "Distinguish the classics in one year". Zheng Xuan's Note: "If you leave the classics, you can't break the sentence." That is, interrupting sentences from ancient books. It can be seen that sentence breaking is the first step of ancient enlightenment education. The ancients punctuated sentences by reading sentences (d6u). Reading sentences refers to the place where syllables stop when reading an article. At first, where does the syllable of the article stop? It can be called sentence, reading or sentence reading. Reading sentences is also called throwing sentences, breaking sentences, measuring sentences, teasing sentences and so on. The following sentences are different from reading. "Language is unique", that is, the place where the meaning has been finished is called a sentence; Also known as sentence absolute, it is equivalent to the period used now; "Incomplete words" or "half-complete words", that is, places that have incomplete meanings but have to stop, are called reading, also called teasing, which is equivalent to commas used today. In ancient times, it was mainly used as a symbol for reading sentences. Say: "Stop and know." Pronunciation, ancient pronunciation such as "bean", today pronunciation such as "Lord". That's the end of the sentence, Mark. Next to the word, this is called a sentence; When the meaning of a sentence is not finished and should be paused, it is called reading to mark and mark between the space and the next word. Although the positions of the marks are different, it is easy to be confused because the same symbols are used. Later, in order to show the difference between a sentence and reading aloud, the circle (O) is used as the symbol of the sentence, and the dot (,or) is used as the symbol of reading aloud, and the position is generally placed at the lower right of the last word that should be pronounced or pronounced. At present, all the sentences we require have a circle (O) mark at the lower right of the space where the sentence is broken. During the May 4th New Culture Movement, some scholars advocated new punctuation marks and used them to punctuate ancient books. Punctuation is used in sentence reading now.
195 1 year, the General Administration of Publishing of the Central People's Government published Usage of Punctuation, which has fourteen kinds of * * *, that is, full stop (. ), semicolon (; ), comma (,), pause (,), colon (:), question mark (? ), exclamation point (! ), quotation marks (""), brackets (), ellipsis (...), dash (-), bullet (added under the word), book title (""), proper name (-added under the word), interval symbol (. B is between words. The first eight are collectively referred to as dot numbers, and the last six are collectively referred to as labels with interval numbers.