Thread: Simple Chinese punctuation introduction

Thanks again iyuanobi!
Just one more question, could you please explain me a bit about the line breaking rules in Chinese?
I mean, I guess there are some characters that canīt be at the end/beginning of a line, while others must remain together in the same line, and so on.

In addition, how do you handle widows/orphans in Chinese?

;-)

Hey Iyuanobi, are there inverted commas in Chinese Simplified and Traditional?

Originally Posted by Maximiliano

Hey Iyuanobi, are there inverted commas in Chinese Simplified and Traditional?

Hi Maxi, in traditional Chinese the corner brackets are used instead of inverted commas whether horizontal or vertical orientation.
For simplified Chinese, it uses the European-style marks in most places.

Originally Posted by iyuanobi

Morning Santi, well far as I know the only rule about breaking lines is to respect the meaningful unit according to the context. As you know, unlike western languages, we do not have spaces between characters in Chinese.
So when you decide to break the line you always have to respect the smallest meaningful unit/word. For example: We play at the wildlife park. The translation for this phrase would be: 我們在野生動物園玩。
For instance, the correct break between the meaningful unit that are all acceptable in the line would be: 我們 / 在 / 野生 / 動物 / 園 / 玩. (The smallest meaningful unit for this context would be > We / at / wildlife / animals / park / play.)
However, there may be other meaningful units by breaking the phrase differently such as: 我們 / 在野 / 生動 / 物 / 園 / 玩 and their meaning changes in some cases > We / to be out of office / vividly / object / park / play.
In the second example, we see that the meaning changes totally and turned out to be out of context and would be inappropriate to do the breaking (Highlighted in red) in these places.

And about your second question, are you referring to the operating system in Chinese?

So, there's absolutely no way to know how to break lines properly in order to respect meaningful unit if you are not a Chinese speaker. So I will need to send files to a Chinese proofer after DTP.

This thread is so interesting!
I don't know any Chinese, but it's fascinating!


It's probably silly of me, but I was surprised by the fact that the colon is placed vertically (as usual...)
I'm I just too used to reading and writing from left to right, so it looks sideways to me... haha.

I also liked the contrast between real and fake italics.
I guess this just shows how biased we can be sometimes...

Thanks for sharing iyuanobi!
Are there any other things we should consider when reading Chinese? Or if it's me, when staring dumbfounded while trying to make some sense of the structure? (￣▽￣*)ゞ

Well, Chinese is very interesting as itīs one kind of hieroglyphic language. So when you read it you find that each character transmits a concept related to the nature. In other words, you could try imaging each of the characters as an image and that definitely helps in some cases. Do you speak or read Chinese?

Originally Posted by iyuanobi

Well, Chinese is very interesting as itīs one kind of hieroglyphic language. So when you read it you find that each character transmits a concept related to the nature. In other words, you could try imaging each of the characters as an image and that definitely helps in some cases. Do you speak or read Chinese?

No, but I do know some Japanese. Actually, I took a short course on Kanji (am I super nerdy or what?!) (o^ ^o)
We studied how they developed from ideograms and changed over time. We also looked into their structure and how they are classified according to their radical. I think they are beautiful. That's actually what got me interested!

I know that Japanese sentence structure differs from that of Chinese, but that's it!
In my opinion, kana helps a lot when reading Japanese. As a student, I found them quite helpful in understanding sentence structure. Is there something like that in Chinese?

Originally Posted by solg

No, but I do know some Japanese. Actually, I took a short course on Kanji (am I super nerdy or what?!) (o^ ^o)
We studied how they developed from ideograms and changed over time. We also looked into their structure and how they are classified according to their radical. I think they are beautiful. That's actually what got me interested!

I know that Japanese sentence structure differs from that of Chinese, but that's it!
In my opinion, kana helps a lot when reading Japanese. As a student, I found them quite helpful in understanding sentence structure. Is there something like that in Chinese?

Wow thatīs amazing, well if you know Japanese then definitely Chinese is kind of easy to you too as they have many similarities in kanji.
Unfortunately we don't have phonogram system as kana, so itīs kind of a good memory exercise as you will have to learn one by one the phonetics of each ideograms separately by heart.
I am thinking that this may be a solution to Alzheimer, lol