Europeans began to use punctuation marks even before the new era. The history of European punctuation began with the Alexandrian grammars. During this time, the icons used to separate the ends of the semantic parts or emotional coloring have changed several times. In general, the punctuation system used in European and some other languages developed by the fifteenth century.
Instructions
Step 1
Browse texts in one of the European languages, Japanese, Sanskrit, and Ethiopian. You will see that Japanese text is not only composed of hieroglyphs. There you can find both periods and semicolons - however, the comma can be inverted. As for the Sanskrit passage, there is a vertical line at the end of the sentence.
Step 2
In Slavic languages, the same system of punctuation marks is used as in Russian, regardless of the type of writing. A full stop, question mark or exclamation mark is placed at the end of a sentence. Parts of a sentence, appeal, homogeneous members are separated by commas. Moreover, the rules by which these signs are placed have a lot in common with the Russians. In Slavic languages, a semicolon, a colon, a dash, and an ellipsis are used. Outwardly, these signs look exactly the same as the Russian ones.
Step 3
Germanic languages also use punctuation marks similar to Russian. In German or English text, you will find periods, commas, dashes, and everything else. Basically, the placement rules coincide with the Russian ones - in the same way, a sentence ends with a period, a question or exclamation mark, an appeal is highlighted with a comma, etc. But there are also differences. For example, in some languages, subordinate clauses may not be highlighted with commas.
Step 4
There are some differences in the Romance languages. If in French, Italian or Portuguese almost the same periods, commas and question marks are used as in Russian, then Spanish punctuation has some differences. The interrogative sentence and exclamation are highlighted by the corresponding signs on both sides, and at the beginning of the phrase the sign is inverted. From the point of view of a non-native speaker of Spanish, Spanish written language appears to be more expressive than any other.
Step 5
The European punctuation system has had a great influence on languages belonging to other language families. The Hungarians, Estonians and Finns, who speak the Uralic languages, adopted the punctuation marks from their neighbors.
Step 6
Although the punctuation rules are similar in different European languages, there are some differences in spelling. For example, quotation marks differ in Russian and English. In some languages, an exclamation-question mark is used to enhance the emotional attitude to what is said. An exclamation point is put first, then an interrogative one. In Russian, in such cases, the first is the question mark.
Step 7
As for dashes and hyphens, an em dash is used to separate parts of a sentence, a hyphen is used to hyphenate words and separate parts of a compound word. The rules of use in European languages are similar. But, for example, in Chinese, a hyphen is used only in cases where it stands next to the letters of the Latin alphabet.
