So I’ve noticed that Chinese sentences are sometimes extremely lengthy. Why are Chinese writers so afraid of using full stops? Right now I feel like punctuation was an afterthought in this language.
I’ll give you the sentence that caused me much frustration:
A full stop after “男女” would, in my opinion, break this up nicely. Upon reading “由于种种原因” for the first time, I lost my way. This clause belongs to the second part of the sentence, so dangling it there, mid sentence, is misleading.
In English we could add a “who” in there, so we know that there are two lovers WHO, for many reasons, could only see each other once a year.
Why punctuation? Because in modern Chinese, a sentence can denote different meanings by punctuating it differently. An example is this notorious sentence, 下雨天留客天留我不留.
Also some characters somewhat take the place of punctuation, like 吗 or 了 which often mark the effective end of the sentence, or 说/曰 to mark quotations.
And in classical Chinese, the meaning is made clear by the use of the “結構助詞” 之、乎、者、也、然、矣、哉、焉、等、且 …, which to a great extent alleviates the necessity of punctuation marks.
为什么中国的文言文没有标点符号？ - 知乎 has some photos showing the punctuation marks used in ancient publications.
One of the writers asserts that, 中国古代不但不是没有标点，反而是有大量的有标点书籍存在的。问题在于标点的系统不统一，几乎每家各用一套系统，你用圆我用方，你用实心的我用空心的，你 标注在文字左边我标注在文字下面……和其他各种学问一样，问题也是出在没有系统上。没有系统，所以不能流传，进而就会失传。