Author: Jaehong Park
2012-10-14
When we look at a foreign book, there is something very noticeable: the punctuation marks. At the slightest slip, we think that symbols and marks on pages seem to be uniform in shape and function to the usual Korean punctuation marks. However, punctuation marks of every language are different with differing functions.
In 1933, Korean punctuation marks officially appeared on Korean Orthographical Standardization Proposal and started being used only from the 1960s. For Chinese characters, they traditionally wrote letters without space. That is because understanding of the un-spaced letters was a criterion for evaluating one’s academic ability. This was a historical setback for the development of Korean punctuation marks.
