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Little punctuation marks—like a comma, question mark, or an apostrophe—can make or break the flow or meaning of a sentence. In fact, this is how confusing life would be without proper punctuation.
The apostrophe (’, ' ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for three basic purposes:
For example, to represent the string eat 'hot' dogs in Pascal one uses 'eat ''hot'' dogs'. Other languages use an escape character, often the backslash, as in 'eat \'hot\' dogs'. In the TeX typesetting program, left double quotes are produced by typing two back-ticks (``) and right double quotes by typing two apostrophes ('').
Paragraph mark, paragraph sign, paraph, alinea, or blind P: Section sign ('Silcrow') ⌑ Pillow (non-Unicode name) 'Pillow' is an informal nick-name for the 'Square lozenge' in the travel industry. The generic currency sign is superficially similar | Pipe (non-Unicode name) (Unicode name is "vertical bar") + Plus sign: minus sign, ampersand: ±
Another punctuation common in the Indian Subcontinent for writing monetary amounts is the use of /- or /= after the number. For example, Rs. 20/- or Rs. 20/= implies 20 whole rupees. Thai, Khmer, Lao and Burmese did not use punctuation until the adoption of punctuation from the West in the 20th century. Blank spaces are more frequent than full ...
A paragraph (from Ancient Greek παράγραφος (parágraphos) 'to write beside') is a self-contained unit of discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. Though not required by the orthographic conventions of any language with a writing system , paragraphs are a conventional means of organizing extended segments of prose .
Punctuation in the English language helps the reader to understand a sentence through visual means other than just the letters of the alphabet. [1] English punctuation has two complementary aspects: phonological punctuation, linked to how the sentence can be read aloud, particularly to pausing; [2] and grammatical punctuation, linked to the structure of the sentence. [3]
Some letters are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ʔ , originally had the form of a question mark with the dot removed. A few letters, such as that of the voiced pharyngeal fricative, ʕ , were inspired by other writing systems (in this case, the Arabic letter ﻉ , ʿayn, via the reversed apostrophe). [9]