Wang Li "Talking about Punctuation Format" with the Sun brothers

Liu Fei unit: Xiamen Experimental Middle School, Fujian Institute of Education Institute of Basic Education Curriculum Textbook Research Center

On July 30, 1939, Today's Review, Vol. 2, No. 6, published Mr. Wang Li's article "On Punctuation Format".

In fact, if the title of Mr. Wang's article "On Punctuation Format" is arranged as "On Punctuation Format" or more appropriately, in addition to discussing the misuse of punctuation, there are also questions about whether the initials cited in Chinese articles need to be capitalized and whether Chinese articles are arranged horizontally or vertically. Among them, the misuse of punctuation mainly talks about the use of periods without circles, avoiding top lacustication, using more periods to avoid teasing to the end, using exclamation points reasonably to avoid abuse, using in-sentence brackets for interjection notes, question marks for cross-examination sentences, and pseudo-full without quotation marks. At that time, few people paid attention to these, and even if they did, most of them were aimed at small issues that were not worth mentioning, and few people wrote articles to discuss them in the magazine, but Mr. Wang, who was a professor at Southwest United University, "did not do anything small", which showed Mr. Wang's attitude towards learning. At the same time, problems such as the use of exclamation points, misuse of sentence parentheses in sentences, and misuse of quotation marks are also stubborn diseases at present, and Mr. Wang's article still has guiding significance for the use of punctuation today, so this article is still regarded as an important document in the field of punctuation research. It is included in the "Punctuation Dictionary" edited by Yuan Hui, "Teaching Chinese and Chinese In the 20th Century" by Chen Liming and Lin Huajun, and "Index of Chinese and Chinese Linguistic Papers" compiled by the Institute of Linguistics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Of course, due to the limitations of the times, Mr. Wang's article also has points in which the period is discarded and the article abandons the horizontal and straight, which are inconsistent with the current popular facts. However, what Mr. Wang did was an academic discussion, and its academic value could not be judged by today's actual use.

Regarding the reason for the writing of the article "On Punctuation Format", Mr. Wang also explained in the article, that is, "the issue of punctuation and format of the article seems so small in the minds of ordinary people, so no one has seriously discussed it in the magazine." As far as I know, only Mr. Sun Fuxi has made a few brief remarks in the Bookmaker Monthly, to the effect that the period is not used to use circles, and the period commas on books and newspapers are often arranged in the first grid of a line. At that time, this short miscellaneous feeling aroused my interest, and I always hoped to have the opportunity to discuss this issue that was ignored by ordinary people in detail. ”

In the articles written by Sun Fuxi before 1939, there is no one related to punctuation, but in the February 1937 issue of the "Shuren Monthly" Volume 1, No. 2, there is an article by Sun Fuyuan's "Punctuation Miscellaneous Talk", which coincides with the article that Mr. Wang Li saw that "Mr. Sun Fuxi briefly talked a few words in the Shuren Monthly".

"Punctuation Miscellaneous" is divided into four parts: punctuation at the beginning of the line, punctuation of the half-plate, strange use of dots, and old-style punctuation, the first three parts talk about the problems in the use of punctuation in newspapers and books at that time, and the last part puts forward Sun's views on the use of punctuation at that time, that is, "Before the implementation of the word classification book, when writing or typography were still used in direct quotation, I thought that punctuation was still more comfortable with the old style." ”

Comparing the two, we can find that what Mr. Wang said about "talking a little bit about it in the Shuren Monthly" was actually Sun Fuyuan. Sun Fuyuan (1894-1966), formerly known as Fuyuan, Ziyangquan, pen names Fulu, Baisheng, Tongbai, Songnian and so on. A native of Shaoxing, Zhejiang, a modern essayist and a famous editor of a supplementary periodical, known in the history of journalism as the "King of Supplementary Periodicals" of the Republic of China, he has twice entered Lu Xun's disciples, and Lu Xun's famous work "A Q Zheng Biography" was published in the "Morning News Supplement" edited by him. In October 1936, after the death of Mr. Lu Xun, it was he who wrote the famous lianhe - "Stepping on the plains, cutting the weeds, the hot wind rushing, a lifetime of shouting; painful destruction, sighing, October bad news, the crowd wandering.". The association integrates Mr. Lu Xun's works and experiences, and has always been recited by people. His younger brother Sun Fuxi (1898-1962), the character Chun moss (that is, "Chuntai" in Lu Xun's diary), once used pen names Ding Yi, Ming Zhai, Shou Ming Zhai, etc., modern essayist, artist, once went to France to study, first at the Sino-French University of Lyon, and then into the French National Academy of Fine Arts. Mr. Lu Xun asked him to design covers for his collection of prose poems "Weeds" and the translation collection "Little John". Both of the Sun brothers were very close to Lu Xun, and both worked as editors of supplements, and there were many similarities in experience, coupled with the inconvenience of checking the information during the war, Mr. Wang mistakenly recorded "Punctuation Miscellaneous Talks" as written by Sun Fuxi, which is also understandable. Fortunately, Mr. Wang conveniently explained the publication of the magazine, which provided convenience for us to examine the source stream today, otherwise this fact would not be restored.

On June 3 and August 10, 1946, nearly 10 years after the publication of Sun Fuyuan's Punctuation Miscellaneous Talks, there were still two articles discussing whether to use circles or dots in the Ta kung WanBao. Both articles are conclusive that the use of punctuation has rarely been noticed, and only Sun Fuxi and Wang Yi have written articles to discuss it in magazines, but they have not attracted enough attention. Their authors probably did not see Sun's original text, but quoted the words in Mr. Wang's article. This is still the case 10 years apart, and today, more than 80 years after Sun Wen's publication, this kind of chen xiangyin's mistake is even more numerous. I hope to be of benefit to the academic community and commemorate the 35th anniversary of Mr. Wang Li's death.

Guangming Daily (November 26, 2021, 16th edition)

Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily