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Punctuation

By abandoning any pretence of being descriptive of real-world usage, the appendix on punctuation is the weakest chapter in Huang–Shih.

An adequate treatment of Mandarin punctuation must take account of the following facts:

  1. Punctuation marks are not an integral part of written Mandarin. It is very common in written communications to use space as the only punctuation indicator.

  2. The actual set of punctuation marks being used varies considerably depending on the particular Mandarin-speaking region and personal preferences as influenced by contact with other languages, especially Japanese and English.

  3. Unicode glyphs and descriptions must be used if punctuation marks are to specified unambigously.