Punctuation marks

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Punctuation marks
Comma, comma ,
Semicolon, semicolon ;
Colon, colon :
Point .
Ellipsis ...
Focus ·
bullet point •
Question mark ?
Exclamation, exclamation, call signs !
Apostrophe, apostrophe '
- - Hyphen ; Hyphen ;
Supplementary line
Indent ; Up line -
quotation marks "" »«  /  «»
‚'› ‹  /  ‹ › 
Slashes / \
Brackets () []

Punctuation marks are special characters of a font , the structuring and also the sense gebung of sentence structure serve. The setting of the punctuation marks is called punctuation or punctuation .

This does not include letters and numbers as well as special characters carrying information ( currency symbols , mathematical symbols , etc.) and - according to some authors - word characters . The latter are also treated here. In the case of a distinction, punctuation marks and word marks are combined as punctuation marks , see there.

The structuring brought about by the punctuation marks helps to record the desired speech or breathing rhythm of the spoken speech on paper, without which the spoken word would sound like a bad automaton voice.

history

The oldest known document that uses punctuation is the Mescha stele from the 9th century BC. With dots between the words and horizontal lines between the sections of meaning. The ancient Greek scripts have a vertical line and one, two or three points on top of each other between the words. Punctuation is more common in Roman inscriptions: periods are used to separate words, but they are missing at the end of a sentence.

In the 7th century other systems emerged, but they were structured in a similar way. The Carolingian time knows the point as a separator, but this also occurs already a dash ( virgula , see Virgel ). This punctuation was later adopted by printers of the Middle Ages and used without any clear rule.

Today's punctuation marks essentially go back to the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius the Elder (1450–1515). The inventor of the italic (their origin because in English as Italics denotes) 1494 erschienenem work printed in Pietro Bembo's De Aetna the first semicolon and standardized, followed by his eponymous grandson, punctuation marks: The Virgel then began to look like today's point. Until then , the purpose of punctuation was to give indications of tone of voice and pauses in breathing when reading aloud from books. Aldus Manutius the Younger stated in 1566 that the main purpose of punctuation was to bring clarity to the syntax. Grandson Aldus Manutius the Younger also presented a system of punctuation marks in 1566, consistently applied in the Antiqua , the typesetting for Latin texts. Both had a basic understanding of punctuation marks as syntactic structural symbols and also used the comma systematically and uniformly for the first time. Your punctuation was exemplary. Today their ideas have essentially been adopted.

The first complete translation of the Bible by Martin Luther in 1534 using the Virgel .

Martin Luther laid many foundations for the language with his translation of the Bible into German, but in his writings, as was customary in the Fraktur script at the time, instead of a comma, he used the Virgel for general separations in a sentence, i.e. the slash , which is used as a comma from the Fraktur set did not finally disappear until around 1700. From then on it was finally replaced by the comma , which Manutius the Elder had already used. Ä. used in the Antiqua .

The technical revolution in letterpress printing, through which printed products could be easily reproduced, the gradual increase in the ability of the population to be able to read, and the trend in an increasingly complex society to record everything in writing, led to a general standardization and homogenization of characters which also led to a solidification of the graphic form of the comma when used in printed matter.

The rules for using punctuation marks change and evolve as needed. There are a number of new comma rules in the German language , which make correct writing easier according to the standard, but in the opinion of some make reading more difficult.

The most common punctuation marks

The most frequently used punctuation marks in German texts are listed in the box on the right. In texts in other languages ​​there are sometimes other punctuation marks or they are used differently.

Example: In English texts, the apostrophe - together with an "s" - often indicates the genitive (example: Miller's garden ). This application is often found today in German texts that deviate from the standard.

  • The point ( . ) At the end of a declarative sentence. It can also be used to break down thousands ( 1,000,000 ) or to identify abbreviations ( etc. ), but in these cases does not serve as a punctuation mark.
  • The question mark ( ? ) Is at the end of a question.
  • The exclamation mark ( ! ) Or callsign comes at the end of an exclamation sentence, an important sentence that needs to be emphasized, or a request or command.
  • The quotation mark ( " and " or " and " , handwritten and in typewriter also the typewriter quotation mark " ) stands at the beginning and at the end of a verbatim speech . It can also be used to represent a term, a quotation or a phrase in a restrictive way .
  • The comma ( , ), and comma mentioned earlier Virgel, stands between partial or subordinate clauses; these can be main or subordinate clauses. In addition, it separates preceding, inserted or trailing words or groups of words from the core sentence and divides the parts of a list if they are not connected by “and” or “or”. Regardless of its function as a punctuation mark, it can also be used as a separator for decimal numbers ( 3.14 ).
  • The semicolon ( ; ) or the semicolon separates two sentences that belong together.
  • The colon ( :) or the colon ends a sentence and at the same time allows a verbatim speech, quotation, list or explanatory text to begin.
  • The space ( ) is placed between two words and after various punctuation marks such as a period or comma.
  • The hyphen or hyphen is used to separate a word when it breaks a line or to form compound words.
  • The apostrophe ( ' ) is an ellipsis .

Less common punctuation marks

  • The dash ( - ), or halftone dash, also used as a bis-dash and a line dash, braces an inserted thought. Incidentally, the typographically correct minus sign does not correspond to the dash. It can be called up under Windows with the key combination [Alt] + "0150" , on the Macintosh with the key combination [Option] + [-] , and with the Neo keyboard layout with [Shift] + [comma] .
  • The em dash (-), also a dash, stands at the beginning of lists as a prime. It can be called up under Windows with the key combination [Alt] + "0151" , on the Macintosh with the key combination [Shift] + [Option] + [-] , and with the Neo keyboard layout with [Shift] + [-] .
  • The high point ( · ) serves as a semicolon in Greek ; in German as a typographical element between words of the same rank that appear without a connected sentence (mostly the middle point is used instead).
  • Slash ( / )
  • Brackets ( ( , ) , [ , ] , < , > , { , } )
  • Ellipses ( ... )
  • The symbol of an index finger ( ☞ ) was used as a punctuation mark until the 18th century, see index (punctuation marks)
  • In Spanish , sentences that end with an exclamation point or question mark are introduced with an inverted exclamation mark ( ¡ , signo de exclamación invertido ) or an inverted question mark ( ¿ , signo de interrogación invertido ).
  • The interrobang ( ‽ ) combines the functions of a question mark and an exclamation mark

An example

Let an example serve to illustrate. A particularly extensive text was selected for this purpose: The counting of the characters in Karl May, Winnetou I , resulted in the following frequencies:

Punctuation marks Percent (of punctuation marks) Percent (all characters) absolute frequency
comma 38.07 1.49 14482
Point 22.54 0.88 8577
quotation marks 22.17 0.87 8434
Exclamation mark 5.18 0.20 1969
Question mark 4.77 0.19 1815
Semicolon / semicolon 3.88 0.15 1478
Colon 1.44 0.06 548
Hyphen, hyphen, hyphen 1.16 0.05 441
Quotation marks (for terms, words) 0.49 0.02 188
apostrophe 0.14 0.01 54
Bracket (right and left) 0.08 0.00 30th
Asterisk (*) 0.07 0.00 28

This table does not distinguish between punctuation marks and word marks. The entire book contains 974,506 characters (letters, spaces and punctuation marks), including 159,093 spaces (= 16.33%) and 38,044 punctuation marks (= 3.90%). Although the evaluated book is an extensive text, the result must not be generalized. Other texts / text types result in different relations. Lothar Hoffmann (1985) gives data on the frequency of certain punctuation marks in the technical language of radio electronics in German, English, French and Russian .

Anecdote about the impact of punctuation marks

The setting of punctuation marks is often important for conveying the desired content. The following fictitious anecdote illustrates this: A long, long time ago there was a villain who was about to be executed. The king was sent. He had the right to pardon the delinquent. A messenger came back from the king with the following message: "I'm not coming to behead!" But where should you put the comma? “I'm coming, don't behead!” Or “I'm not coming, behead!”? Even without a comma, the sentence makes sense, even if a king would certainly have meant the order to his executioner.

See also

literature

Web links

Wiktionary: Punctuation marks  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
Wiktionary: Punctuation  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
  • Karsten Rinas in conversation with Florian Felix Weyh: Punctuation. (Podcast) Linguist on comma rules, callsigns and gender asterisks. In: Deutschlandfunk : Essay and Discourse. Retrieved August 27, 2019 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lynne Truss: Eats, Shoots & Leaves. The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. London 2003.
  2. ^ Martin Lowry: Aldus Manutius and Benedetto Bordon. In search of a link. In: Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester. Volume 66, No. 1, 1983.
  3. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from June 11, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.parlamentsstenografen.de
  4. ^ Karl-Heinz Best : On the frequency of letters, spaces and other characters in German texts. In: Glottometrics 11, 2005, pages 9–31, see Table 9, page 18 (PDF full text ). The article also contains the frequencies of punctuation marks in Gottfried August Bürger: Lenore , Georg Büchner: Lenz , Guntram Vesper: Fugen and Ralf Hoppe: The greedy brain .
  5. ^ Lothar Hoffmann: Communication means technical language. An introduction. Second completely revised edition. Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen 1985, ISBN 3-87808-875-2 , page 90f.