Chinese punctuation for proper nouns

The Chinese language uses two kinds of punctuation for marking up proper nouns – the proper name marks / proper noun marks (Simplified Chinese: 专名号; Traditional Chinese: 專名號) and the book title marks / title marks (Simplified Chinese: 书名号; Traditional Chinese: 書名號). The former may be applied to all proper nouns except when the nouns in question are titles of textual or artistic works, in which case the latter is used instead. The book title marks come in different forms while the proper name mark does not – given that rotated forms are not counted separately.

Old-school styles

Horizontally-aligned text

This style uses two different underlines. The proper name mark appears as a straight underline (No dedicated stand-alone digital characters are available yet…) while the book title mark appears as a wavy underline (﹏).

Example

屈原放逐，乃賦離騒。左丘失明，厥有國語。 (In case there are display errors... '離騷' and '國語' are both supposed to be wavy-underlined.)

Translation: Qu Yuan was exiled, the Li Sao was thus composed . Zuo Qiu (or Zuoqiu) lost his sight, hence there is the Guo Yu.

Vertically-aligned text

In this case, on-the-left beside-lines (︳) and (︴) are used instead of underlines.

Current Status

When a proper noun immediately follows another, the lines accompanying each of them do not connect; many digital systems are unable to display this correctly.

The use of this style is common only in Traditional Chinese school textbooks and modernly-laid-out Classical Chinese text.

Popular styles

Horizontally-aligned text

This style only uses a pair of guillemets (《》) and a pair of angle brackets (〈〉) as book title marks to precede and succede each proper noun which is the title of a piece of textual or artistic work, no punctuation marks are used for other proper nouns.

Vertically-aligned text

In this case, the rotated forms of the above-mentioned symbols (︽︾) and (︿﹀) are used instead of them.

Current status

Since those symbols are processed as individual characters instead of mark-ups on other characters, there are virtually no difficulties for digital systems to display them correctly.

These styles are dominant amongst both printed and digital Chinese text. In Taiwan's Traditional Chinese, the guillemets and angle brackets are chosen according to the format of the textual or artistic work – in general, the formers are for those that would be italicized if they were in English text; the latter are for those that would be in quotations if they were in English text. In Mainland China's Simplified Chinese, guillemets are used regardless of the work's type – angle brackets only appear between them to indicate a title within another title. In Hong Kong and Macao, the governments adopt the Mainland China standard on the usage of all punctuation marks even when the characters are in Traditional Chinese, but otherwise, the Taiwan standard is widely adopted.

See also

• Interpunct, used to mark divisions in proper names in Chinese
• Tai tou, an honorific space sometimes inserted before a person's name as a mark of respect