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The "?" sign | ||
Tags: Punctuation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4500 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 1 of 17 22 January 2012 at 3:48pm | IP Logged |
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Hello everyone!
I was wondering, is the "?" (question mark) the same in every language in the world? I've never studied ancient languages, but did all of them use this same sign to represent a question, or no? If not, what sign did they use? I know it's kind of a useless topic, but I'm just curious about some linguistic facts. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5188 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 2 of 17 22 January 2012 at 4:59pm | IP Logged |
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Ancient Greek used the semicolon ; for the question mark. Subsequently Old Church
Slavonic, both in Glagolitic and Cyrillic used ; to mark questions. I am not sure about Coptic, but I suspect it too deriving from the Greek alphabet used ; . I don't know about Armenian and Georgian alphabets but they were influenced by the Greek one to some extent. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 5846 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 3 of 17 22 January 2012 at 5:19pm | IP Logged |
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My knowledge about this question is not very wide.
However, I can tell you that some languages don't need punctuation marks (the question mark included), since they have special words / particles to indicate that. Arabic for instance: the use of punctuation (in reverse fashion, given that it is written from right to left) is a recent concession to western languages. This happens because the language has its own way of marking whether a phrase is interrogative or not (for instance), hence not needing punctuation marks. I understand that Sanskrit did (does) not have any punctuation, save for end of line, where a vertical bar is used: "|" (for prose) and "||" (for verse). Edited by Luso on 22 January 2012 at 5:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5632 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 17 22 January 2012 at 5:38pm | IP Logged |
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All of my (native and foreign) languages use the "?" - sign to mark a question whereas Spanish also uses a top-down "?" - sign at the beginning of each question.
Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 22 January 2012 at 5:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6444 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 5 of 17 22 January 2012 at 8:03pm | IP Logged |
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Question marks (and punctuation) are quite recent inventions. Ancient languages did not use punctuation at all.
The question mark we have today was invented during mediaeval times and changed to how it looks nowadays with the invention of printing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%3F 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5384 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 6 of 17 22 January 2012 at 11:48pm | IP Logged |
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Arabic uses an inverted question mark (؟), but Hebrew does use the one for left-to-right-script, which I find inconsequential.
Armenian uses a cute circle (՞ ) above the last word of the sentence. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5011 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 7 of 17 30 January 2012 at 1:26am | IP Logged |
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Since the source of the question mark and its mutation from the original have been unburied already, I think it might be interesting to expand this thread into a short chronology (per script) to reflect when things that we take for granted nowadays were invented (approximately, that is).
As a 4yo child I quickly realized text was much easier to read later if I wrote words separated somehow (I used small hyphens). It struck me as kind of depressing when I found out as an adult that such basic things (they just make reading so much easier), like word-separating spaces, lower case and script writing, appeared only recently in comparison to the alphabet we use all the time. In the same vein, I always thought English and other languages were so peculiar because they don't use opening question or exclamation marks like Spanish does -- it makes you switch to the right intonation on the spot so you don't need to read as much ahead as f.e. in English to get it right. Again, turns out it is only a recent (~150 years) invention that no one else has adopted yet. Impossible, you say? Not in the planet of the apes, apparently... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Zireael Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 4436 days ago 518 posts - 636 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, Spanish Studies: German, Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Arabic (Yemeni), Old English | Message 8 of 17 02 March 2012 at 9:45am | IP Logged |
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Why does Spanish have the inverted question and exclamation marks? Are there other languages that have these?
1 person has voted this message useful |
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