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Why does Spanish have upside down punctn? | ||
Tags: Punctuation | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| espejismo Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5052 days ago 498 posts - 905 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Spanish, Greek, Azerbaijani | Message 1 of 5 18 June 2011 at 3:45am | IP Logged | ||
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Why does Spanish have that? Does any other language have this feature?
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 3 of 5 18 June 2011 at 3:59am | IP Logged | ||
My understanding is that questions and exclamations were/are treated as complete entities, much like quotes, and therefore needed opening and closing markers. That's why questions are made of ¿...? and exclamations are made of ¡...! It's unique to Spanish, although there are other forms of question marks in other languages, just not inverted. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| electron44 Newbie United States Joined 5326 days ago 20 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian, Irish | Message 4 of 5 18 June 2011 at 4:05am | IP Logged | ||
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Because it serves to indicate to a reader what intonation should be used for the sentence well in advance and also serves marks the end of said statement. It helps when reading because intonation is incredibly important in Spanish where other formats of question-making are not really readily available. I think this phenomenon is used only in Spanish and to a far lesser extent with languages related to Spanish. I've seen people do it in Galician and Catalan, but I do not believe it is required in those languages, it's probably just habit or something. I can't speak either of them, so a speaker will have to confirm. Usage of inverted punctuation did not always exist in Spanish. It's a relatively modern phenomenon introduced by the RAE and subsequently adapted, albeit rather slowly, as you can find authentic texts from the 19th century in which they aren't used.
Overall, it really helps with lengthy sentences, especially in the beginning when you aren't as accustomed to the word patterns that may hint at a sentence being a question or requiring exclamation. Here's a fun fact for you, just for amusement. My computer is in Spanish and when using voice recognition, the commands to type the question marks are "abrir interrogación" and "cerrar interrogación" respectively. So, it seems there's some truth to the above-stated theory that they are treated like quotational phrases. Edited by electron44 on 18 June 2011 at 4:13am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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