Punctuation centuries meant that a standard system of punctuation was urgently required." The introduction of a standard system of punctuation has also been attributed to the Venetian printers Aldus Manutius and his grandson. They have been credited with popularizing the practice of ending sentences with the colon or full stop, inventing the semicolon, making occasional use of parentheses and creating the modern comma by lowering the virgule. By 1566, Aldus Manutius the Younger was able to state that the main object of punctuation was the clarification of syntax. By the 19th century, punctuation in the western world had evolved "to classify
Reference mark Reference mark The reference mark or reference symbol (※) is a punctuation mark used in Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) writing. It is used to call attention to an important sentence or thought, like a prologue or footnote. In contrast to the European asterisk, it is not used for connecting a specific place in the text directly to the footnote, but rather for notes directly before or after the passage. Its Japanese name, (; , , ), refers to the similarity of the character to the for "rice" (). Its Korean name, ' (), literally means "reference mark". It is