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The "?" sign | ||
Tags: Punctuation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5034 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 9 of 17 02 March 2012 at 4:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Japanese doesn't use question marks at all. (Aside: I don't know that it uses exclamation marks, either.) The language is coded with the question particle, so it doesn't use punctuation to reinforce it.
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| Billy Bob Diglot Groupie Colombia Joined 5283 days ago 48 posts - 57 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Turkish | Message 10 of 17 02 March 2012 at 6:53pm | IP Logged | ||
The inverted versions were first recommended by the RAE in 1754, but were slow to be adopted. In informal situations, they tend to be dropped. I've heard about Galician using both inverted marks, and apparently the inverted question mark is sometimes used in Catalan in front of long or ambiguous phrases, according to this. Edited by Billy Bob on 02 March 2012 at 6:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6659 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 11 of 17 02 March 2012 at 7:31pm | IP Logged | ||
That's not entirely true. They don't use the question mark when a sentence end in the interrogative particle -ka, but for the lower registers where -ka is not needed and questions are only indicated with a rising tone, a question mark is used. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5034 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 12 of 17 02 March 2012 at 9:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you, hampie. As I am still relatively new to Japanese and have concentrated more on formal language, I missed this detail.
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| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5226 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 13 of 17 03 March 2012 at 12:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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The greatest importance of punctuation signs stemmed from their capturing and reflecting speech features that written language had failed to so far. In that sense, 'proper' English, or anything else where turning a statement into a question swaps words around instead of simply altering the intonation, is in less need of questions marks than for example Spanish -- intonation is all too often the only difference between statements and questions there. While we are at it, Spanish sentences are usually longer than their English counterparts, so the opening question mark is actually more helpful than the closing one to get the intonation right without the need to read too far ahead.
Interestingly enough, the more obviously useful something is the later somebody comes up with it. Edited by mrwarper on 03 March 2012 at 12:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5178 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 14 of 17 20 March 2012 at 12:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think Classical Chinese used 耶.
but I don't know if it's not just some ancient question particle. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6659 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 15 of 17 20 March 2012 at 7:24pm | IP Logged | ||
One might think they they sometimes wrote questions in a way they would normally not ask them if speaking, just to show, in writing, that it is indeed a question. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 17 21 March 2012 at 10:50am | IP Logged | ||
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The only one of my languages which doesn't use the 'normal' question mark is Greek, where something like a semicolon ; is used instead. Conditioned from many years with ? I think the semicolon thing looks somewhat underwhelming, so my defense technique is to make the lower half larger so that the whole thing almost looks like an inverted Spanish ¿
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