‘Dash’ – the youngest punctuation mark in Russian
Written text in Russian is often mottled with long horizontal lines. There are obligatory cases when using a dash, but often it is a sign to convey emotion.
There are very few punctuation rules in the Russian language where the dash must be used. Despite this, literary and journalistic texts often abound with long dashes. Why? The dash is the most favorite and widespread in the Russian language author's sign, used to express emotions. A writer can put it almost everywhere.
One of the first writers to use the dash was Nikolai Karamzin in the 18th century. His sentimental story ‘Poor Liza’ (by the way, the first of its kind) is literally full of dashes.
At first, there were no rules for the use of dashes and it is believed that Karamzin used this sign to convey emotion and denote pauses in the necessary places for the writer. By the way, it was Karamzin who also introduced the ellipsis, another popular sign of Russian literature…
Anton Barsov, the author of one of the first studies on Russian grammar, called the dash “the silent sign”. Often, the sign was called simply a ‘line’ and philologist Alexander Vostokov later referred to it as a “thought-separating sign”.
‘Gateway to Russia’ is grateful to Gramota.ru (Грамота.ру) for help in preparing the material.
