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The Punctuation Invasion: How Humans were imprisoned by their own devices (language!)
There are two major styles of punctuation in English: British or American. These two styles differ mainly in the way in which they handle quotation marks, particularly in conjunction with other punctuation marks. In British English, punctuation such as periods and commas are placed outside the closing quotation mark; in American English, however, punctuation is placed inside the closing quotation mark. This rule varies for other punctuation marks; for example, American English follows the British English rule when it comes to semicolons, colons, question marks, and exclamation points.[20][further explanation needed] The serial comma is used much more often in the United States than in England.
Other languages of Europe use much the same punctuation as English. The similarity is so strong that the few variations may confuse a native English reader. Quotation marks are particularly variable across European languages. For example, in French and Russian, quotes would appear as: « Je suis fatigué. » (in French, each "double punctuation", as the guillemet, requires a non-breaking space; in Russian it does not).
In French of France, the signs : ; ? and ! are always preceded by a thin unbreakable space. In Canada, this is only the case for :.
In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point ⟨·⟩, known as the ano teleia (άνω τελεία).
In Georgian, three dots, ⟨჻⟩, were formerly used as a sentence or paragraph divider. It is still sometimes used in calligraphy.
Spanish, and no other language, uses an inverted question mark ⟨¿⟩ at the beginning of a question and the normal question mark at the end, as well as an inverted exclamation mark ⟨¡⟩ at the beginning of an exclamation and the normal exclamation mark at the end.
Armenian uses several punctuation marks of its own. The full stop is represented by a colon, and vice versa; the exclamation mark is represented by a diagonal similar to a tilde ⟨~⟩, while the question mark ⟨՞⟩ resembles an unclosed circle placed after the last vowel of the word.
Arabic, Urdu, and Persian—written from right to left—use a reversed question mark: ⟨⟩, and a reversed comma: ⟨⟩. This is a modern innovation; pre-modern Arabic did not use punctuation. Hebrew, which is also written from right to left, uses the same characters as in English, ⟨,⟩ and ⟨?⟩.
Originally, Sanskrit had no punctuation. In the 17th century, Sanskrit and Marathi, both written using Devanagari, started using the vertical bar ⟨।⟩ to end a line of prose and double vertical bars ⟨॥⟩ in verse.
Punctuation was not used in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing until the adoption of punctuation from the West in the late 19th and early 20th century. In unpunctuated texts, the grammatical structure of sentences in classical writing is inferred from context.[21] Most punctuation marks in modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have similar functions to their English counterparts; however, they often look different and have different customary rules.
In the Indian subcontinent, ⟨:-⟩ is sometimes used in place of colon or after a subheading. Its origin is unclear, but could be a remnant of the British Raj. Another punctuation common in the Indian Subcontinent for writing monetary amounts is the use of ⟨/-⟩ or ⟨/=⟩ after the number. For example, Rs. 20/- or Rs. 20/= implies 20 rupees whole.
Thai, Khmer, Lao and Burmese did not use punctuation until the adoption of punctuation from the West in the 20th century. Blank spaces are more frequent than full stops or commas.