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Semicolon
The semicolon (or semi-colon) is a symbol commonly used as orthographic punctuation. In the English language, a semicolon is most commonly used to link (in a single sentence) two independent clauses that are closely related in thought, such as when restating the preceding idea with a different expression. When a semicolon joins two or more ideas in one sentence, those ideas are then given equal rank. Semicolons can also be used in place of commas to separate items in a list, particularly when the elements of the list themselves have embedded commas. The semicolon is one of the least understood of the standard marks, and is not frequently used by many English speakers. In the QWERTY keyboard layout, the semicolon resides in the unshifted homerow beneath the little finger of the right hand and has become widely used in programming languages as a statement separator or terminator. History In 1496, the semicolon is attested in Pietro Bembo's book ' printed by Aldo Manuz ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Punctuation
Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of writing, written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet-based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization, no vowels (see abjad), and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights (such as Euripides and Aristophanes) did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes Space (punctuation), space between words and both obsolete and modern signs. By the 19th century, the punctuation marks were used hierarchically, according to their weight. Six marks, proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin, could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Colon (punctuation)
The colon, , is a punctuation mark consisting of two equally sized dots aligned vertically. A colon often precedes an explanation, a list, or a quoted sentence. It is also used between hours and minutes in time, between certain elements in medical journal citations, between chapter and verse in Bible citations, between two numbers in a ratio, and, in the US, for salutations in business letters and other formal letters. History In Ancient Greek, in rhetoric and prosody, the term (', 'limb, member of a body') did not refer to punctuation, but to a member or section of a complete thought or passage; see also '' Colon (rhetoric)''. From this usage, in palaeography, a colon is a clause or group of clauses written as a line in a manuscript.''Oxford English Dictionary'', 1st ed. "colon, ''n.2''" Oxford University Press (Oxford), 1891. In the 3rd century BC, Aristophanes of Byzantium is alleged to have devised a punctuation system, in which the end of such a was thought to oc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Comma
The comma is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight, but inclined from the vertical; others give it the appearance of a miniature filled-in figure placed on the baseline. In many typefaces it is the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark . The comma is used in many contexts and languages, mainly to separate parts of a sentence such as clauses, and items in lists mainly when there are three or more items listed. The word ''comma'' comes from the Greek (), which originally meant a cut-off piece, specifically in grammar, a short clause. A comma-shaped mark is used as a diacritic in several writing systems and is considered distinct from the cedilla. In Byzantine and modern copies of Ancient Greek, the " rough" and " smooth breathings" () appear above the letter. In Latvian, Romanian, and Livonian, the comma diacritic appears below the lette ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Punctuation
Punctuation in the English language helps the reader to understand a sentence through visual means other than just the letters of the alphabet. English punctuation has two complementary aspects: '' phonological punctuation'', linked to how the sentence can be read aloud, particularly to pausing; and '' grammatical punctuation'', linked to the structure of the sentence. In popular discussion of language, incorrect punctuation is often seen as an indication of lack of education and of a decline of standards. Variants British and American styles The two broad styles of punctuation in English are often called ''British'' (typically used in the UK, Ireland, and most of the Commonwealth of Nations) and ''American'' (also common in Canada and places with a strong American influence on local English, as in the Philippines). These two styles differ mainly in the way in which they handle quotation marks with adjacent punctuation and the use or omission of the full point (period) with co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aldus Manutius
Aldus Pius Manutius (; ; 6 February 1515) was an Italian printer and Renaissance humanism, humanist who founded the Aldine Press. Manutius devoted the later part of his life to publishing and disseminating rare texts. His interest in and preservation of Greek manuscripts mark him as an innovative publisher of his age dedicated to the editions he produced. Aldus Manutius introduced the small portable book format with his ''enchiridia'', which revolutionized personal reading and are the predecessor of the modern paperback book. He also helped to standardize use of punctuation including the comma and the semicolon. Manutius wanted to produce Greek language, Greek texts for his readers because he believed that works by Aristotle or Aristophanes in their original Greek form were pure and unadulterated by translation. Before Manutius, publishers rarely printed volumes in Greek, mainly due to the complexity of providing a standardized Greek typeface. Manutius published rare manuscripts ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Statement (programming)
In computer programming, a statement is a syntactic unit of an imperative programming language that expresses some action to be carried out. A program written in such a language is formed by a sequence of one or more statements. A statement may have internal components (e.g. expressions). Many programming languages (e.g. Ada, Algol 60, C, Java, Pascal) make a distinction between statements and definitions/declarations. A definition or declaration specifies the data on which a program is to operate, while a statement specifies the actions to be taken with that data. Statements which cannot contain other statements are ''simple''; those which can contain other statements are ''compound''. The appearance of a statement (and indeed a program) is determined by its syntax or grammar. The meaning of a statement is determined by its semantics. Simple statements Simple statements are complete in themselves; these include assignments, subroutine calls, and a few statements which may ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Homerow
Touch typing (also called blind typing, or touch keyboarding) is a style of typing. Although the phrase refers to typing without using the sense of sight to find the keys—specifically, a touch typist will know their location on the keyboard through muscle memory—the term is often used to refer to a specific form of touch typing that involves placing the eight fingers in a horizontal row along the middle of the keyboard (the ''home row'') and having them reach for specific other keys. (Under this usage, typists who do not look at the keyboard but do not use home row either are referred to as hybrid typists.) Both two-handed touch typing and one-handed touch typing are possible. Frank Edward McGurrin, a court stenographer from Salt Lake City, Utah who taught typing classes, reportedly invented home row touch typing in 1888. On a standard QWERTY keyboard for English speakers the home row keys are: "ASDF" for the left hand and "JKL;" for the right hand. Most modern computer keyb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Keyboard Layout
A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual, or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard. Standard keyboard layouts vary depending on their intended writing system, language, and use case, and some hobbyists and manufacturers create non-standard layouts to match their individual preferences, or for extended functionality. is the actual positioning of keys on a keyboard. is the arrangement of the legends (labels, markings, engravings) that appear on those keys. is the arrangement of the key-meaning association or keyboard mapping, determined in software, of all the keys of a keyboard; it is this (rather than the legends) that determines the actual response to a key press. Modern computer keyboards are designed to send a scancode to the operating system (OS) when a key is pressed or released. This code reports only the key's row and column ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
QWERTY
QWERTY ( ) is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets. The name comes from the order of the first six Computer keyboard keys#Types, keys on the top letter row of the keyboard: . The QWERTY design is based on a layout included in the Sholes and Glidden typewriter sold via E. Remington and Sons from 1874. QWERTY became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878 and remains in ubiquitous use. History The QWERTY layout was devised and created in the early 1870s by Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer who lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In October 1867, Sholes filed a patent application for his early writing machine he developed with the assistance of his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule, Samuel W. Soulé. The first model constructed by Sholes used a piano-like keyboard with two rows of characters arranged alphabetically as shown below: - 3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 2 4 6 8 . A B C D E F G H I J K L M Sholes struggled for th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Question Mark
The question mark (also known as interrogation point, query, or eroteme in journalism) is a punctuation, punctuation mark that indicates a question or interrogative clause or phrase in many languages. History The history of the question mark is contested. One popular theory posits that the shape of the symbol is inspired by the crook in a cat's tail, often attributed to the ancient Egyptians. However, Egyption hieroglyphics did not utilize punctuation marks. In the fifth century, Classical Syriac, Syriac Bible manuscripts used question markers, according to a 2011 theory by manuscript specialist Chip Coakley: he believes the ''zagwa elaya'' ("upper pair"), a vertical double dot over a word at the start of a sentence, indicates that the sentence is a question. From around 783, in Godescalc Evangelistary, a mark described as "a lightning flash, striking from right to left" is attested. This mark is later called a . According to some palaeography, paleographers, it may have indi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geʽez Script
Geʽez ( ; , ) is a script used as an abugida (alphasyllabary) for several Afroasiatic languages, Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan languages, Nilo-Saharan languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea. It originated as an abjad (consonantal alphabet) and was first used to write the Geʽez language, now the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Catholic Church, the Ethiopian Catholic Church, and Haymanot Judaism of the Beta Israel Jewish community in Ethiopia. In the languages Amharic and Tigrinya language, Tigrinya, the script is often called ' (), meaning "script" or "letter". Under the Unicode Standard and ISO 15924, it is defined as Ge'ez text. The Geʽez script has been adapted to write other languages, mostly Ethiopian Semitic languages, Ethiopian and Eritrean Semitic, particularly Amharic in Ethiopia, and Tigrinya in both Eritrea and Ethiopia. It has also been used to write Sebat Bet Gurage language, Sebat Bet ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bamum Script
The Bamum scripts are an evolutionary series of six scripts created for the Bamum language by Ibrahim Njoya, King of Bamum (now western Cameroon). They are notable for evolving from a pictographic system to a semi-syllabary in the space of fourteen years, from 1896 to 1910. Bamum type was cast in 1918, but the script fell into disuse around 1931. A project began around 2007 to revive the Bamum script. The Bamum script is also used to write the Shümom language, also invented by Njoya. History In its initial form, Bamum script was a pictographic mnemonic aid (proto-writing) of 500 to 600 characters. As Njoya revised the script, he introduced logograms (word symbols). The sixth version, completed by 1910, is a syllabary with 80 characters. It is also called ''a-ka-u-ku'' after its first four characters. The version in use by 1906 was called ''mbima''. The script was further refined in 1918, when Njoya had copper sorts cast for printing. The script fell into disuse in 1931 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
