Periods and commas
xiaophil
June 19, 2009, 05:21 AM posted in General DiscussionPerhaps this is the dullest topic ever, but this is a small something that no Chinese has been able to give me a clear answer.
Q: When do I know when to place a comma; when do I know when to place a period?
I often read a string a phrases that are strung together by commas and then are finally ended with a period, but I can't see if there is rhyme or reason to it. I have pointed this out to some Chinese, and they say these phrases have a relationship so they are connected by a comma. This seems pretty willy-nilly. Are there firm rules?
xiaophil
June 19, 2009, 06:01 AMHi changye
Anceint Greek too! I suppose most of the old languages didn't bother with punctuation marks. Given the Chinese character of going with the flow, I suspect there isn't a rule--just a feeling.
kennethshultz
June 19, 2009, 06:15 AMI wish Chinese [language] would get with the punctuation party.
changye
June 19, 2009, 06:19 AMHi xiaophil
Come to think of it, old Japanese didn't have punctuation marks either. The usage of komma in modern Japanese is rather arbitrary too.
changye
June 19, 2009, 06:29 AMMy take is as follows,
我的一个好友见我情绪低落，就建议我出去旅游。
他还说可以去济州岛，那里的风景十分美丽，值得去看看。
changye
June 19, 2009, 05:49 AMHi xiaophil
I don't know if there are clear rules for punctuations in modern Chinese. All I can say is that ancient Chinese people didn't use punctuation marks in writings, which is rather inconvenient for readers.
WillBuckingham
June 19, 2009, 08:45 AMPunctuation? Dull? But I love punctuation!
I was talking with a Chinese friend about all this a couple of days ago, as I was momentarily baffled by the difference in a text I was reading between commas (,) and enumeration/serial commas ( 、 顿号 dun4hao4). Anyway, the following article on Wikipedia clears this one up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_punctuation
Unfortunately it doesn't help when it comes to ordinary commas (，) and periods (。)
There's a scholarly paper on segmentation of long Chinese sentences using commas here. From the abstract it looks forbiddingly technical ("The comma plays an important role in long Chinese sentence segmentation. This paper proposes a method for classifying commas in Chinese sentences by their context, then segments a long sentence according to the classification results. Experimental results show that accuracy for the comma classification reaches 87.1 percent...").
I haven't yet managed to download it due to a tricksy internet connection here. But it may shed some light. Or else further darkness...
WillBuckingham
June 19, 2009, 08:52 AMJust managed to download it. It definitely sheds darkness, rather than light... But for those with a penchant for graphs and tables of numbers, it may provide some diversion...
xiaophil
June 20, 2009, 12:23 AMthinkbuddha
Wow! I didn't even know there was a difference between a comma and an enumeration comma.
Do you know how to type on a keyboard an enumeration comma?
bababardwan
June 20, 2009, 01:08 AMxiaophil,
While in pinyin input mode,just press the key above the right shift key.In English mode it usually makes this \ or | when you press the shift key.But in pinyin input 、、、、、、
xiaophil
June 19, 2009, 06:48 AMchangye,
Yes, I can see your rationale in your example, but my example was taken directly from a "模范" essay in my old textbook, so I think it was already okay. That's not to say there couldn't be an editing error... Anyway, I have decided it is the writer's discretion until I hear otherwise.
Any Chinese grammarians out there?
xiaophil
June 19, 2009, 05:22 AMI suppose an example could help:
我的一个好友见我情绪低落，就建议我出去旅游，他还说可以去济州岛，那里的风景十分美丽，值得去看看。
In English, we probably would have had at least four sentences here.
Anyway, thanks to anyone who can give some input.