Punctuation marks: overview, the full stop and the comma

The branch of linguistics that studies where each mark goes is called punctuation (punktuatsiya). In speech, intonation and pauses divide a thought into pieces; in writing, punctuation marks do this job. They rely on the structure of the sentence and help the reader understand a text quickly and correctly. Ten main marks are used in Uzbek writing: full stop, comma, question mark, exclamation mark, colon, semicolon, dash, quotation marks, ellipsis and brackets. If a mark is out of place, the meaning of a sentence may change: “Ustoz, Aziz keldi” (we tell the teacher that Aziz has come) and “Ustoz Aziz keldi” (Teacher Aziz has come) mean different things. The dash (–) and the hyphen (-) are not the same: the dash is written between words with spaces on both sides, while the hyphen joins word parts (ota-ona, aytdi-yu).