Talk:Chinese punctuation

Currently the En-dash description says “a fullwidth en dash”. In Western typography an en-dash is not a full character width, and the example character is an em-dash (which is a full character width). Comparison: - hyphen, – en-dash, — em-dash, —— double em-dash.

   - ← hyphen
   – ← en-dash U+2013
   — ← em-dash U+2014  （佔一个字的位置：—）
   —— ← double em-dash （佔兩个字的位置：——）

I suspect the current “Em-dash” title should be changed to “Double em-dash” or “Two character-width line”, and the current “En-dash” title should be changed to “Em-dash”. I don’t know anything about Chinese, so can someone who does check this please? ^_^ Hope that helps!

Ref: 标点符号^[1]

--Oli Studholme (talk) 07:06, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

A dash that is two ems wide is called a two-em dash, at least in some circles (e.g., Chicago Manual of Style 16/e §6.90).—al12si (talk) 23:19, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

One cannot really use the terms fullwidth and halfwidth in any other context than computer encoding. This article however uses the terms in the context of the history of punctuation marks, where these terms make no sense at all.

For starters, these terms refer solely to the number of bytes needed for encoding in certain pre-Unicode character sets. Roughly speaking, halfwidth = lower ASCII, fullwidth = Chinese. As it happens, many older systems were by their nature semi-fixed pitch (they used a memory mapped display with character cells) so the encoding affected the display, but this doesn't affect writing and nowadays Chinese fonts support proportional European text, and that isn't necessarily restricted to half-width characters. (I have several Chinese fonts that render the halfwidth and fullwidth alphabetical characters identically, both as proportional characters.)

A European full stop isn't halfwidth, not even visually, it just is as narrow as it is. There is no standard character cell for it to be half the width of. And even labelling the grid-aligned Chinese characters as fullwidth is a mistake, since the term fullwidth isn't a visual term, but refers to encoding instead.

(The above unsigned comment was written at 17:12, 21 January 2014‎ by someone at 82.139.81.0)

This is only half true. Half-width characters, when the term was invented, was in fact both visual and encoding-related. An ASCII character was half-width because it took up half the space of a CJK glyph, while a CJK glyph used two bytes and also visually double the width of ASCII characters. This simplified processing because the number of bytes in the encoding actually corresponded to the number of ems displayed on the screen.

Of course, this would have only meant anything for CJK encoding systems. But a CJK user would have always described a Western character set as “half width” because back in those early days everything was monospace on a grid.—al12si (talk) 23:26, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Support for emphasis marks is defined in CSS3, but seems only to be partially supported by Google Chrome so far. Example: 着重號 and

90.196.106.93 (talk) 19:45, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

Why doesn't the normal comma have a paragraph? --2.245.250.233 (talk) 20:38, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

The opening line of the first section claims that older texts never use spaces in between characters. I laughed out loud. This is patently absurd to anyone who has cracked even a single Chinese text printed before the twentieth century. Sections, paragraphs, chapters, and poetry are all often delineated by spaces in various arrangements, even in haphazardly printed texts, both inside lines and as indents. They may not used in the same way as European languages, but so. (Likewise, although admittedly less prevalent, 〇。、et cetera do find use in printed and handwritten texts. Not to mention that characters may be sized for footnotes or glosses, a la 康熙字典.) I propose this be clarified and corrected, as it currently insinuates the fiction that literary Chinese texts are without spaces and indents. 曙䬠 - Sant'owax Q'ulsnas (talk) 06:16, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

It would be really helpful to provide the Unicode encodings for these symbols. At the very least I'm going to link to CJK Symbols and Punctuation. --Thnidu (talk) 19:37, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

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A passage added by Edd3 claims that the hyphenation point (U+2027) is used in place of a middle dot in Taiwan, but the linked Unicode chart does not support this. In addition, U+2027 was not mapped from CNS 11643, whereas U+00B7 and U+30FB were. Ibadibam (talk) 23:28, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

The paragraph in the introduction that starts: "The first was given by the Han dynasty scholar..." should in fact be at the end of Footnote A. The text makes no sense where it is. (This error seems to have been introduced by an edit using the ProveIt tool, 31 May 2021.)

2607:F010:2E9:7:E1FD:14AF:18A4:2004 (talk) 00:36, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

the symbol "※" doesn't seem to appear in this article but it's used in 𰻝𰻝面 - Wikipedia Brawlio (talk) 01:06, 9 September 2024 (UTC)