Semicolon

The semicolon (;) is a punctuation mark with several uses. The Italian printer Aldus Manutius the Elder established the practice of using the semicolon to separate words of opposed meaning and to allow a rapid change in direction in connecting interdependent statements. "The first printed semicolon was the work of ... Aldus Manutius" in 1494. Ben Jonson was the first notable English writer to use the semicolon systematically. The modern uses of the semicolon relate either to the listing of items or to the linking of related clauses. In Unicode it is encoded at U+003B ; SEMICOLON (;). According to Lynne Truss, a British writer on grammar, many non-writers avoid the colon and semicolon for various reasons: "They are old-fashioned", "They are middle-class", "They are optional", "They are mysteriously connected to pausing", "They are dangerously addictive (vide Virginia Woolf)", and "The difference between them is too negligible to be grasped by the brain of man". American novelist Kurt Vonnegut famously completely avoided semi-colons in all his works, complaining that "[t]hey are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college." However, the semi-colon is used frequently in academic writing.

English

File:SemicolonFreq.png

The frequency of semicolons in English texts from 1500–2008

While terminal marks (i.e., full stops, exclamation marks, and question marks) mark the end of a sentence, the comma, semicolon and colon are normally sentence internal, making them secondary boundary marks. The semicolon falls between terminal marks and the comma; its strength is equal to that of the colon.

Constraints

1. When a semicolon marks the right boundary of a constituent (e.g., a clause or a phrase), the left boundary is marked by punctuation of equal or greater strength.
2. When two or more semicolons are used within a single construction, all constituents are at the same level unlike commas which can separate, for example, subordinate clauses from main clauses.

Usage

Semicolons are followed by a lower case letter, unless that letter is the first letter of a proper noun like the word I or Paris. Modern style guides recommend no space before them, and one space after. Modern style guides also typically recommend placing semicolons outside of ending quotation marks—although this was not always the case. For example, the first edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (1906) recommended placing the semicolon inside ending quotation marks.

Applications of the semicolon in English include:

• Between items in a series or listing containing internal punctuation, especially parenthetic commas, where the semicolons function as serial commas:
  • The people present were Jamie, who came from New Zealand; John, the milkman's son; and George, a gaunt kind of man.
  • Several fast food restaurants can be found within the following cities: London, England; Paris, France; Dublin, Ireland; Madrid, Spain.
  • Here are three examples of familiar sequences: one, two, and three; a, b, and c; first, second, and third.
  • She stood at the edge, deciding her course of action; changed her mind and walked home.
  • (Fig. 8; see also plates in Harley 1941, 1950; Schwab 1947).

This is by far the most frequent use currently.

• Between closely related independent clauses not conjoined with a coordinating conjunction:
  • I went to the basketball court; I was told it was closed for cleaning.
  • I told Kate she's running for the hills; I wonder if she knew I was joking.
  • I told John that his shoe was untied; he looked.
  • At the mall I bought four things; my sister bought only two things.

• Between independent clauses linked with a transitional phrase or a conjunctive adverb:
  • Everyone knows he is guilty of committing the crime; of course, it will never be proven.
  • It can occur in both melodic and harmonic lines; however, it is subject to certain restraints.
  • Of these patients, 6 were not enrolled; thus, the cohort was composed of 141 patients at baseline.

This is the least common use, and is mostly confined to academic texts.

Other languages

Arabic

In Arabic, the semicolon is called Fāṣila Manqūṭa (Template:Lang-ar) which means literally "a dotted comma", and is written inverted ( ؛ ). In Arabic, the semicolon has several uses:

• It can be used between two phrases, in which the first phrase causes the second.

Example: "He played much; so, his clothes became dirty". (Template:Lang-ar)

• It can be used in two phrases, where the second is a reason for the first.

Example: "Your sister did not get high marks; because she didn't study sincerely". (Template:Lang-ar)

Greek and Church Slavonic

In Greek and Church Slavonic, a semicolon indicates a question, similar to a Latin question mark. To indicate a long pause or separate sections, each with commas (the semicolon's purpose in English), Greek uses the "άνω τελεία", an interpunct ( · ).

Examples:

Greek: Με συγχωρείτε· πού είναι οι τουαλέτες; (Excuse me; where are the toilets?)

Church Slavonic: гдѣ єсть рождeйсѧ царь їудeйскій; (Where is the one who is born king of the Jews? - Matthew 2:1)

French

In French, a semicolon is used where either a column or a comma would be only half appropriate. The phrase following a semicolon can be either a full sentence (as if following a period) or a phrase (as if following a comma). However, in none case would the first next word be capitalized (except for intrinseque reason). Its meaning is only slightly related to the colon's, if at all.

The closest English equivalent would be an en or em dash. The dash character is used in French writing too (for example, by Belgian novellist Georges Simenon), but not as widely as the semicolon.

Usage of these devices (semicolon and dash) somehow varies from author to author.

Literature

"Just as there are writers who worship the semicolon, there are other high stylists who dismiss it – who label it, if you please, middle-class."

 Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.

Some authors have spurned the semicolon throughout their works. Lynne Truss stated that "Samuel Beckett spliced his way merrily through such novels as Molloy and Malone Dies, thumbing his nose at the semicolon all the way," "James Joyce preferred the colon, as more authentically classical; P. G. Wodehouse did an effortlessly marvelous job without it; George Orwell tried to avoid the semicolon completely in Coming up for Air, (1939)," "Martin Amis included just one semicolon in Money (1984)," and "Umberto Eco was congratulated by an academic reader for using no semicolons in The Name of the Rose (1983)."

Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without a Country (2005) stated: "Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."

Computing usage

See also: Colon (punctuation) § Computing

The semicolon is represented by Unicode and ASCII character U+003B ; SEMICOLON. The EBCDIC semicolon character is 94 or 0x5E. Scripts comprising wide characters, such as kanji, use a full-width equivalent, ；, located at Unicode code point U+FF1B (fullwidth semicolon).

Programming

In computer programming, the semicolon is often used to separate multiple statements (for example, in Perl, Pascal, PL/I, and SQL; see Pascal: Semicolons as statement separators). In other languages, semicolons are called terminators and are required after every statement (such as in Java, and the C family). The use of semicolons in control flow structures and blocks of code is varied – semicolons are generally omitted after a closing brace, but included for a single statement branch of a control structure (the "then" clause), except in Pascal, where a semicolon terminates the entire if…then…else clause (to avoid dangling else) and thus is not allowed between a "then" and the corresponding "else", as this causes unnesting.

This use originates with ALGOL 60, and falls between the comma (,) – used as a list separator – and the period/full stop (.) – used to mark the end of the program. The semicolon, as a mark separating statements, corresponds to the ordinary English usage of separating independent clauses, and gives the entire program the gross syntax of a single ordinary sentence. Of these other characters, while commas have continued to be widely used in programming for lists (and rare other uses, such as the comma operator that separates expressions in C), the period as the end of the program has fallen out of use.

In some cases the distinction between a separate and a terminator is strong, such as early versions of Pascal, where a final semicolon yields a syntax error. In other cases a final semicolon is treated either as optional syntax, or as being followed by a null statement, which is either ignored or treated as a NOP (no operation or null command); compare trailing commas in lists. In some cases a blank statement is allowed, allowing a sequence of semicolons or the use of a semicolon by itself as the body of a control flow structure. For example, a blank statement (a semicolon by itself) stands for a NOP in C/C++, which is useful in busy waiting synchronization loops.

Other languages (for instance, some assembly languages and LISP dialects, CONFIG.SYS and INI files) use semicolons to mark the beginning of comments.

Example C++ code:

int main(void) 
{
  int x, y;
  x = 1; y = 2;   // Two statements are separated by the semicolon
  std::cout << x << std::endl;
 
  while (wait_event()) ;
 
  return 0;
}

Conventionally, in many languages, each statement is written on a separate line, but this is not typically a requirement of the language. In the above example, two statements are placed on the same line; this is legal, since the semicolon separates the two statements.

Data

The semicolon is often used to separate elements of a string of text. For example, multiple e-mail addresses in the "To" field in some e-mail clients have to be delimited by a semicolon.

In Microsoft Excel, the semicolon is used as a list separator, especially in cases where the decimal separator is a comma, such as 0,32; 3,14; 4,50, instead of 0.32, 3.14, 4.50.

In MATLAB and GNU Octave, the semicolon can be used as a row separator when defining a vector or matrix (whereas a comma separates the columns within a row of a vector or matrix) or to execute a command silently, without displaying the resulting output value in the console.

In HTML, a semicolon is used to terminate a character entity reference, either named or numeric.

In some variants of the comma-separated values file format, the semicolon is used as the separator character.

Other uses

The semicolon is commonly used as parts of emoticons, in order to indicate winking.

Mathematics

In the argument list of a mathematical function $f(x_{1},x_{2},\dots ;a_{1},a_{2},\dots )$, a semicolon may be used to separate variables from parameters.

In differential geometry, a semicolon preceding an index is used to indicate the covariant derivative of a function with respect to the coordinate associated with that index.

References

• Hacker, Diana (2002). The Bedford Handbook (6th ed. ed.). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. ISBN 0-312-41281-9. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help)

External links

• Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location - New York Times, Feb. 18, 2008.
• Has modern life killed the semicolon? - Slate, June 20, 2008.
• The end of the line? - The Guardian, April 4, 2008.
• The Use of Semicolons in English
• Examples of how to use the Semicolon