Punctuation plays an important role in writing and reading, and if there is no punctuation to break sentences, it will be very difficult to read. Different people will have different understandings of the meaning of the same sentence when they read it.
For example, in Zhao Tianyang's "Revised Interpretation of the New Collection" of the Qing Dynasty, there is a very controversial sentence: "Stay in the guest on a rainy day, and leave me in the sky."
How should this sentence be understood?
"On a rainy day, stay a guest day, leave me behind? Stay! "--- means to stay guests.
But the original meaning is "stay on a rainy day, and I won't stay on a rainy day!" --- said he didn't want to keep customers.
It can be seen that different sentences will not only produce ambiguity, but even run counter to the author's original idea.
The formal use of modern punctuation marks was only a few hundred years ago, so how did the ancients break sentences when reading?
The evolution of punctuation
In fact, long before the Qin and Han dynasties, people had already discovered this problem.
In the excavation of the earliest oracle bone inscriptions and the Yunmeng Qin Slips of the Qin Dynasty, there are already some simple symbols, such as "vertical, constant, curved, folded" or left blank, etc., to provide convenience for readers.
By the time of the Han Dynasty, people began to use the term "sentence reading (comma)" to distinguish sentences and tone pauses within an article.
So the first thing people do when they read at this time is to learn "sentence reading", and it was said in the "Three Character Classic": "Reading clear sentences is a scholar".
Reading is not just about following a book, but about adding your own understanding to break sentences.
As a teacher, we must first teach students to use "sentence reading", just like in mathematics, we must first learn addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, otherwise we can't even understand the meaning expressed in the text, how can we learn?
In fact, to put it simply, "sentence reading" is equivalent to the collective name of full stop and comma today, that is, "the language is absolutely a sentence, and the pause is a reading", the pause in the tone of the text is called "reading (comfun)", and the complete paragraph is called "sentence".
However, in the Han Dynasty, the use of symbols was not standardized, and there were more than ten kinds of sentence break symbols used.
As recorded in "Historical Records: Funny Biography": "(Oriental) Shuo first entered Chang'an, and when he went to the bus to write a book, he used 3,000 songs. …… The Lord of Man reads it from above, stops, and ends there, and the reading is the end of February. ”
"B" is a sentence reading symbol.
After the Song Dynasty, people began to use the red pen to draw circles next to the words in the book, and draw dots next to the places where the words are abrupt to mark, and later used chicken feathers to stamp the clay cover circles.
It is recorded in "History of the Song Dynasty • The Biography of He Ji": "Whatever is read, all punctuation. ”
"Punctuation" is also called "circle point", and the word "remarkable" comes from this way, which is used to indicate that the person's work has been left in the history books, and future generations can circle and dot on it.
After the Ming Dynasty, some books began to use sentence reading symbols when they were written, so that people could read them conveniently, so that readers did not have to break sentences according to their own ideas.
There are even notation symbols for the names of people and places, that is, a straight line next to the name of the person, and a double straight line next to the name of the place.
The punctuation marks we use today are evolved on the basis of the ancient "sentence reading", and then combined with some Western symbols, to form the various punctuation marks we use today.
Therefore, in our opinion, the ancient text is not broken and difficult to read, but the ancients are still looking for various ways to increase the efficiency of reading, which is also a long evolutionary process, and also reflects the ancient cultural heritage of the mainland.
Source: WeChat public account "Interesting cold knowledge"
Author: Jiayu Qiuyang
Editor: Pan Xi
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