Question mark

The question mark ? (also known as interrogation point, query, or eroteme in journalism) is a punctuation mark that indicates a question or interrogative clause or phrase in many languages.

History The history of the question mark is contested. One popular theory posits that the shape of the symbol is inspired by the crook in a cat's tail, often attributed to the ancient Egyptians. However, Egyptian hieroglyphics did not use punctuation marks. The question mark (or "note of interrogation") is "said by Bilderdijk to have been formed from the first and last letters of the Latin word Quæstio, question, placed one over the other; thus, Qo." In the fifth century, Syriac Bible manuscripts used question markers, according to a 2011 theory by manuscript specialist Chip Coakley: he believes the zagwa elaya ("upper pair"), a vertical double dot over a word at the start of a sentence, indicates that the sentence is a question.

From around 783, in Godescalc Evangelistary, a mark described as "a squiggle rising diagonally from left to right above a point" or "a lightning flash, striking from right to left" is attested. This mark is later called a punctus interrogativus. According to some paleographers, it may have indicated intonation, perhaps associated with early musical notation like neumes. Another theory, is that the "lightning flash" was originally a tilde or titlo, as in ·~, one of many wavy or more or less slanted marks used in medieval texts for denoting things such as abbreviations, which would later become various diacritics or ligatures. The creation of the punctus interrogativus has also been attributed to Alcuin of York, an advisor to Charlemagne.

From the 10th century, the pitch-defining element (if it ever existed) seems to have been gradually forgotten, so that the "lightning flash" sign (with the stroke sometimes slightly curved) is often seen indifferently at the end of clauses, whether they embody a question or not.

In the early 13th century, when the growth of communities of scholars (universities) in Paris and other major cities led to an expansion and streamlining of the book-production trade, punctuation was rationalized by assigning the "lightning flash" specifically to interrogatives; by this time, the stroke was more sharply curved and can easily be recognized as the modern question mark (see, for example, De Aetna (1496) printed by Aldo Manuzio in Venice). The punctus interrogativus is encoded in unicode as the character ⹔ (U+2E54 ⹔ MEDIEVAL QUESTION MARK). In 1598, the English term point of interrogation is attested in an Italian–English dictionary by John Florio. In the 1850s, the term question mark is attested:

The mark which you are to notice in this lesson is of this shape ? You see it is made by placing a little crooked mark over a period.... The name of this mark is the Question Mark, because it is always put after a question. Sometimes it is called by a longer and harder name. The long and hard name is the Interrogation Point.

Scope In English, the question mark typically occurs at the end of a sentence, where it replaces the full stop (period). However, the question mark may also occur at the end of a clause or phrase, where it replaces the comma (see also Question comma):

Is it good in form? style? meaning? or:

Showing off for him, for all of them, not out of hubris—hubris? him? what did he have to be hubrid about?—but from mood and nervousness. This is quite common in Spanish, where the use of bracketing question marks explicitly indicates the scope of interrogation.

En el caso de que no puedas ir con ellos, ¿quieres ir con nosotros? ("In case you cannot go with them, would you like to go with us?") A question mark may also appear immediately after questionable data, such as dates:

Genghis Khan (1162?–1227)

In other languages and scripts

French spacing French orthography specifies a narrow non-breaking space before the question mark. (e.g., "Que voulez-vous boire ?"); in English orthography, no space appears in front of the question mark (e.g. "What would you like to drink?"). However, this style of spacing can also be seen in some older English works.

Opening and closing question marks in Spanish

In Spanish, since the second edition of the Ortografía of the Real Academia Española in 1754, interrogatives require both opening ¿ and closing ? question marks. An interrogative sentence, clause, or phrase begins with an inverted question mark ¿ and ends with the question mark ?, as in:

Ella me pregunta «¿qué hora es?» – "She asks me, 'What time is it?'" Question marks must always be matched, but to mark uncertainty rather than actual interrogation omitting the opening one is allowed, although discouraged:

Gengis Khan (¿1162?–1227) is preferred in Spanish over Gengis Khan (1162?–1227) The omission of the opening mark is common in informal writing, but is considered an error. The one exception is when the question mark is matched with an exclamation mark, as in:

¡Quién te has creído que eres? – "Who do you think you are?!" (The order may also be reversed, opening with a question mark and closing with an exclamation mark.) Nonetheless, even here the Academia recommends matching punctuation:

¡¿Quién te has creído que eres?! The opening question mark in Unicode is U+00BF ¿ INVERTED QUESTION MARK (¿).

Solomon Islands Pidgin In Solomon Islands Pidgin, the question can be between question marks since, in yes/no questions, the intonation can be the only difference.

?Solomon Aelan hemi barava gudfala kandre, ia man? ('Solomon Islands is a great country, isn't it?')

Armenian question mark

In Armenian, the question mark is a diacritic that takes the form of an open circle and is placed over the stressed vowel of the question word. It is defined in Unicode at U+055E ◌՞ ARMENIAN QUESTION MARK.

Greek question mark The Greek question mark (Greek: ερωτηματικό, romanized: erōtīmatikó) looks like ;. It appeared around the same time as the Latin one, in the 8th century. It was adopted by Church Slavonic and eventually settled on a form essentially similar to the Latin semicolon. In Unicode, it is separately encoded as U+037E ; GREEK QUESTION MARK, but the similarity is so great that the code point is normalised to U+003B ; SEMICOLON, making the marks identical in practice.

Mirrored question mark in right-to-left scripts

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.