Question mark

A pot in a cemetery with a question mark on the forehead.

The question marks (¿?) are used to graphically represent the interrogative intonation of a word, in the Spanish language they are double signs, that is, there is a sign opening (¿) and closing (?), which must be placed respectively at the beginning and at the end of an interrogative sentence.

The decimal value in ASCII ? is 63₁₀, and in ISO-8859-1/ISO-8859-15 ¿ it is 0191; in Unicode, U+00BF corresponds to ¿ and U+003F to ?.

Using the Opening Question Mark

In most languages, a single question mark is used at the end of the question sentence: Quanti anni hai?, Quants anys tens?, How old are you ?, How many years do you have ? (PT EU) or How many years have you been? (PT BR), How many years have you been?, How old are you? (in Italian, Catalan, French, Portuguese, Galician and English, respectively: "¿Cuántos años tienes?").

This was also the usual use in Spanish until long after the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), in the second edition of the Ortografía de la Lengua Castellana de 1754, declared it mandatory to start the questions with an opening question mark and ending them with the existing closing question mark (“How old are you?”), while ordering the same for the question marks. admiration (¡) and (!).

Unlike other languages in Spanish, the rule of using double signs was established: the opening and closing signs.

This is because the rule that was introduced was subjective, specifying that the signs (¿) and (¡) were only necessary in the case of long sentences, not being necessary if the sentence was short. This norm remained active in the 1815 edition of the spelling, and in fact it can be verified that until the 1869 edition of the RAE dictionary, words like "caramba" they were defined in the dictionary in the entry Wow!. It was not until 1884 that the dictionary began to define the word in the entry Wow!, making the signs (¿) and (¡) definitively mandatory regardless of the length of the sentence.

In Spanish it is correct to frame a sentence with the opening expression of admiration (¡) and the closing of the question mark (?), or vice versa, in cases that share clearly the admiring and interrogative, such as Who do you think you are?. However, the RAE prefers the use of both signs for the opening and closing: Who have you thought you are!? (see Interrobang). And in works of an encyclopedic nature, the use of the question mark is common to indicate uncertain dates. An example would be Genghis Khan (1162?-1227).

Another language in which the opening of the question mark is used is Galician, although it is optional and is relegated to facilitate reading and avoid ambiguities. In Catalan orthography, the linguist Joan Solà defended that the opening should also be used of the question mark (but not in the case of the exclamation point), and some publication followed Solà's advice; but this practice is residual in the whole of written production in Catalan, where practically only the closing sign is used (as in other European languages).

History

Ancient manuscript scholar J. F. Coakley surmises that the first written sign used with a function resembling the present question mark is a pair of vertical dots (��), present in manuscripts of the V and VI of the Peshitta, a version of the Bible in Syriac language. This sign, known in later East Syriac sources as zawgā 'elāyā, was used to mark yes or no questions, and was usually placed above the last letter of a word, near the beginning. of the question. Therefore, Syriac could be the first language to use a question mark. The question mark in the Armenian language bears some similarities to Syriac zawgā 'elāyā, but the manuscript evidence is much later, and if there is any borrowing, it is more likely to be borrowed by Armenian from Syriac than the other way around.

Greek scribes also used a question mark in the form of a semicolon with a function similar to that described above: to mark yes or no answer questions that would otherwise be ambiguous if left unmarked. However, this practice did not occur until the 8th century at the earliest. However, British scholar Sebastian Brock has pointed out that "practices followed in Syriac scriptoriums in the centuries V al VIII did not correspond exactly to that of the Greek scriptoriums; the scribes and scriptoriums had developed their own distinctive practices and independent traditions".

Punctuation in medieval manuscripts, therefore, could vary from period to period, region to region, and even script to script.

The punctus interrogativus, an ancestor of the question mark, is shown in a Latin manuscript of the centuryXI.

In Latin, the punctus interrogativus was also a product of the Carolingian period. This sign is part of the set of marks called positurae that appear in liturgical manuscripts from the second half of the VIII century to complete the scriptio continua script style.

In these manuscripts, the positurae satisfied the need to more precisely indicate the pauses necessary to elucidate the meaning of a text when it was intoned or sung in the liturgy, and also to distinguish between a statement and a question.

The use of the punctus interrogativus seems to have spread rapidly from the court of Charlemagne to other centers, appearing in the calligraphy of the original scribes in manuscripts copied at the end of the century VIII, for example, in lowercase mordramno script (see CLA, V, 613 and CLA, V, 631), in & script #34;a-b" from Corbie (CLA, V, 662), in script type "eN" lower case (CLA, v. 638) and in manuscripts from Saint-Amand, Gaul, France (CLA, VI, 758). ">IX appears in Carolingian manuscripts from the Saint-Denis abbey in France with a very particular shape (a very extended wavy line accompanied, not by a dot, as usual, but by two dots) (CLA, VI, 758), and also in other places.

The positurae added new signs to the general repertoire of punctuation and continued to be used until the end of the Middle Ages, although the form of some signs underwent changes. Two of these signs (the punctus elevatus ⹎ and the punctus interrogativus) survive to this day in modified forms such as the colon (:) and the question mark (?).

The current practice in Spanish of using an opening question mark before a question seems to have developed throughout the second half of the century XVIII. In previously printed books in Spain, the closing question mark was simply applied after the phrase or sentence that expressed a question. But in the 18th century it was considered that this practice did not provide the reader with enough information to allow them to adequately express the interrogative intonation in sentences long.

At a meeting held on March 5, 1739, the Royal Spanish Academy in Madrid decided that it would try to establish general rules for the spelling of the Spanish language, and in 1741 published a treatise on the subject. As part of this project, the Academy addressed the issue of question scoring. Later, in the second edition of his treatise on orthography, published in 1754, he proposed using the same closing question mark (?), placing it backwards (¿) before the word in which the interrogative tone begins.

There is a widespread hypothesis that the current question mark originates from the letters "qo", presumably used to abbreviate the Latin word quaestiō (&# 34;question"). According to this hypothesis, over time the "q" was located on the "o" and the latter decreased in size to give rise to the current question mark point. This hypothesis was created by the Dutch writer Willem Bilderdijk, who dealt with questions of poetry and language in his 4-volume work Taal, published between 1820 and 1823. However, there is no evidence to support this hypothesis, rather, more recent research suggests that the current question mark comes from the punctus interrogativus in Latin, which it changed until it gave rise to its current form.