Punctuation in Modern Greek

• Period (.)
  is placed at the end of a complete sentence; the first letter of the word that comes after the period is capitalized, just like in most European languages.

  Comma (,)

  is the most frequently used punctuation mark and is used to denote a very short pause in speech; most of the times it is used in the same way as in English.

  Semicolon ()

  is used to denote a pause shorter than the one denoted by the period but longer than by the comma, pretty much as one does in English; note that the semicolon in Greek does not look like the semicolon in English!

  Question mark (;)

  same usage as in English, but note that it looks like the English semicolon!

  Exclamation mark (!)

  no differrent than its English counterpart.

  Colon (:)

  is used when we quote someone or when we enumerate, explain or state a result.

  Quotes (<< >>)

  are used in the place of the English quotes (" ").

The following marks are also used in some special cases.

• Apostrophe (')
  replaces the first or last vowel of a word when this vowel is ommitted due to one of the "vowel alterations".

  Decimal point (,)

  is used only for the relative pronoun , (=whatever) to distinguish it from the conjunction (=that); it is also used as the decimal point in writing non-integers, instead of the Western-European period (.), e.g. 1,2 = one point two.

  Diaeresis ()

  are placed on top of or to denote that this or must be pronounced seperately, when the previous letter is one of the vowels , or . Many thanks to Bruce P. Burrell (bpb@umich.edu) for the English term.

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