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Punctuation is "the use of spacing, conventional signs, and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading, both silently and aloud, of handwritten and printed texts."〔''Encyclopaedia Britannica'': ("Punctuation ).〕 Another description is: "The practice, action, or system of inserting points or other small marks into texts, in order to aid interpretation; division of text into sentences, clauses, etc., by means of such marks."〔''Oxford English Dictionary, definition 2a. 〕 In written English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences. For example: "woman, without her man, is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of men), and "woman: without her, man is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of women) have very different meanings; as do "eats shoots and leaves" (which means the subject consumes plant growths) and "eats, shoots, and leaves" (which means the subject eats first, then fires a weapon, and then leaves the scene).〔Truss, Lynne (2003). ''Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation''. Profile Books. ISBN 1-86197-612-7.〕 The sharp differences in meaning are produced by the simple differences in punctuation within the example pairs, especially the latter. The rules of punctuation vary with language, location, register and time and are constantly evolving. Certain aspects of punctuation are stylistic and are thus the author's (or editor's) choice. Tachygraphic language forms, such as those used in online chat and text messages, may have wildly different rules. For English usage, see the articles on specific punctuation marks. ==History== The first writing systems were either logographic or syllabicfor example, Chinese and Maya scriptwhich do not necessarily require punctuation, especially spacing. This is because the entire morpheme or word is typically clustered within a single glyph, so spacing does not help as much to distinguish where one word ends and the other starts. Disambiguation and emphasis can easily be communicated without punctuation by employing a separate written form distinct from the spoken form of the language that uses slightly different phraseology. Even today, formal written modern English differs subtly from spoken English because not all emphasis and disambiguation is possible to convey in print, even with punctuation. Ancient Chinese classical texts were transmitted without punctuation. However, many Warring-states-era bamboo texts contain the symbols and indicating the end of a chapter and full stop, respectively.〔林清源，《簡牘帛書標題格式研究》台北：文印書館，2006。(Lin Qingyuan, ''Study of Title Formatting in Bamboo and Silk Texts'' Taipei: Yiwen Publishing, 2006.) ISBN 957-520-111-6.〕 By the Song dynasty, addition of punctuation to texts by scholars to aid comprehension became common.〔The ''History of the Song Dynasty'' (1346) states 「凡所讀書，無不加標點」 (Among those who read texts, there are none who do not add punctuation).〕 The earliest alphabetic writing had no capitalization, no spaces, no vowels and few punctuation marks. This worked as long as the subject matter was restricted to a limited range of topics (e.g., writing used for recording business transactions). Punctuation is historically an aid to reading aloud. The oldest known document using punctuation is the Mesha Stele (9th century BC). This employs points between the words and horizontal strokes between the sense section as punctuation. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Punctuation」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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