2292: Ellipses around the World Mar 26, 2021

While the function of punctuation is the same across the board , there are many different styles that these take around the globe. In the case of ellipses (...), these are generally used to indicate that text is missing or otherwise abbreviated, and in German these are used even for an omitted letter. Sometimes the style is different, such as whether to include an exclamation point or question mark before as in the Russian (!..) (?..) or after. Japanese ellipses are elevated from the line instead and use 6 dots rather than 3; Chinese also uses 6 dots, but in 2 sets of 3 with a space. Other languages ditch the dots altogether and have separate symbols like in Thai (ฯ) or Laotian (ຯ). Mongolian, which in its traditional script writes top to bottom uses vertical ellipses of 4 dots (᠁).