Punctuation vowel of the word. Arabic, Urdu, and Persian—written from right to left—use a reversed question mark: , and a reversed comma: . This is a modern innovation; pre-modern Arabic did not use punctuation. Hebrew, which is also written from right to left, uses the same characters as in English, and . Originally, Sanskrit had no punctuation. In the 17th century, Sanskrit and Marathi, both written using Devanagari, started using the vertical bar to end a line of prose and double vertical bars in verse. Punctuation was not used in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing until the adoption of punctuation from
What Is a Nation? What Is a Nation? "What is a Nation?" ("Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?") is an 1882 lecture by French historian Ernest Renan (1823–1892), known for the statements that a nation is "a daily referendum", and that nations are based as much on what the people jointly forget, as what they remember. It is frequently quoted or anthologized in works of history or political science pertaining to nationalism and national identity. Renan wrote "What is a Nation" in order to symbolize the nationalism which was born in France as a result of the French Revolution of 1789. Renan begins his essay by noting