Polish Orthography - Punctuation

Punctuation

Polish punctuation is similar to that of English. However there are more rigid rules concerning use of commas—subordinate clauses are almost always marked off with a comma, while it is normally considered incorrect to use a comma before a coordinating conjunction with the meaning "and" (i or oraz).

Abbreviations (but not acronyms or initialisms) are followed by a period when they end with a letter other than the one which ends the full word. For example, dr has no period when it stands for doktor, but takes one when it stands for an inflected form such as doktora and prof. has period because it comes from profesor (professor).

Apostrophes are used not to separate foreign-spelt stems from Polish inflected endings, as it is commonly (erroneously) worded, but to mark the elision of the final letter(s) of the foreign words unspoken before the Polish endings, as in Tony'ego (genitive of "Tony"; because of unspoken "y") but Johna (genitive of "John"; final "n" is spoken); cf. genitive of Charles: English name—Charlesa (final "s" is spoken), French name—Charles'a (final "s" is not spoken).