Chinese Punctuation

Chinese punctuation uses a different set of punctuation marks from European languages. Chinese punctuation only became an integral part of the written language in the 20th century, as Western punctuation marks were adopted. Before that, Eastern Asian cultures ignored the use of punctuation. The first book to be printed with modern punctuation was Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy (中國哲學史大綱) by Hu Shi (胡適), published in 1919. Scholars did, however, annotate texts with symbols resembling the modern '。' and '、' (see below) to indicate full-stops and pauses, respectively. Traditional poetry and calligraphy maintains the punctuation-free style.