In the English English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into South-East Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, and of language, the question mark (?), also known as an interrogation point, interrogation mark, question point, query,^[1] or eroteme, is a punctuation mark Punctuation marks are symbols which indicate the structure and organization of written language, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading aloud that replaces the period A full stop or period (American English) (sometimes point or dot) is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of sentences at the end of an interrogative sentence A question may be either a linguistic expression used to make a request for information, or else the request itself made by such an expression. This information is provided with an answer. It can also be used mid-sentence to mark a merely interrogative phrase, where it functions similarly to a comma The comma is a punctuation mark. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline of the text. Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight, or with the appearance of a small filled-in number 9, such as in the single sentence "Where shall we go? and what shall we do?", but this usage is increasingly rare. The question mark is not used for indirect questions. The question mark character is also often used in place of missing or unknown data.

Some other languages also use the question mark, or variants on it to denote questions in writing.

History

Lynne Truss attributes an early form of the question mark to Alcuin of York Alcuin of York or Ealhwine, nicknamed Albinus or Flaccus (730s or 740s – May 19, 804) was a scholar, ecclesiastic, poet and teacher from York, Northumbria. He was born around 735 and became the student of Ecgbert at York. At the invitation of Charlemagne, he became a leading scholar and teacher at the Carolingian court, where he remained a.^[2] Truss describes the punctus interrogativus of the late 700s as "a lightning flash, striking from right to left", a mark looking like this. (The punctuation system of Aelius Donatus Aelius Donatus was a Roman grammarian and teacher of rhetoric. The only fact known regarding his life is that he was the tutor of St. Jerome, current through the Early Middle Ages The Early Middle Ages was the period of European history lasting from the 5th century to approximately 1000. The Early Middle Ages followed the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and preceded the High Middle Ages . The period saw a continuation of trends begun during the decline of the Roman Empire, including population decline, especially in, used only simple dots at various heights.)

This early question mark was a decoration of one of these dots, with the "lightning flash" perhaps meant to denote intonation In linguistics, intonation is variation of pitch while speaking which is not used to distinguish words. Intonation and stress are two main elements of linguistic prosody (or was it a tilde The tilde is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character comes from Spanish, from the Latin titulus meaning a title or superscription, though the term “tilde” has evolved in that language and now has a different meaning in linguistics. The tilde is colloquially known as a 'squiggly' by people who do not know its name or titlo, named after the latin word titulus, as in “ ·~ ”, like those wavy and more or less slanted marks used in lots of medieval texts for denoting various things such as abbreviations, and that would become later various diacritics or ligatures or modified letters used in the Latin script?), and perhaps associated with early musical notation like neumes A neume is the basic element of Western and Eastern systems of musical notation prior to the invention of five-line staff notation. The word is a Middle English corruption of the ultimately Ancient Greek word for breath (pneuma - πνεῦμα)^[3][4]. Over the next three centuries this pitch-defining element (if it ever existed) seems to have been forgotten, so that the Alcuinesque stroke-over-dot 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 thirteenth century, when the growth of communities of scholars (universities A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is a corporation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education. The word university is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, roughly meaning "community of) in Paris and other major cities led to an expansion and streamlining of the book-production trade ^[5], punctuation was rationalised by assigning Alcuin's stroke-over-dot specifically to interrogatives; by this time the stroke was more sharply curved and can easily be recognised as the modern question-mark.

The symbol is also sometimes ^[6] thought to originate from the Latin Latin or sometimes Roman is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Although often considered a dead language, in view of the fact that it has no native, fluent speakers, Latin continues to be taught in schools and has been, and currently is, used in the process of new word production in modern languages from many quaestiō (that is, qvaestio), meaning "question", which was abbreviated during the Middle Ages The Middle Ages is a period of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The period followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, and preceded the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period in a three-period division of history: Classical, Medieval, and Modern. The term "Middle Ages" (medium aevum) was coined in to Qo. The uppercase Q was written above the lowercase o, and this mark was transformed into the modern symbol. However, evidence of the actual use of the Q-over-o notation in mediaeval manuscripts is lacking; if anything, mediaeval forms of the upper component seem to be evolving towards the q-shape rather than away from it.

Other languages

Opening and closing question marks

In some languages, such as Spanish Countries where Spanish has official status. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 25% or more of the population. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 10-20% of the population. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 5-9.9% of the population, Galician Galician is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, as well as in small bordering zones in the neighbouring autonomous communities of Asturias and Castile and León and in Northern Portugal and Leonese The Leonese language developed from Vulgar Latin with contributions from the pre-Roman languages which were spoken in the territory of the Spanish provinces of León, Zamora, and Salamanca and in some villages in the District of Bragança, Portugal. Close to Mirandese and Asturian, it belongs to Astur-Leonese subgroup of Iberian languages. Most, typography since the 18th century has required opening and closing question marks, as in "¿Qué hora es?" (What time is it?); an interrogative sentence or phrase begins with an inverted question mark (¿) and ends with the question mark (?). This orthographical The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur or Serbian, there can be more than one orthography. Orthography is derived from Greek ὀρθός orthós ("correct") and γράφειν rule is often disregarded in quick typing Typing is the process of inputting text into a device, such as a typewriter, cell phone, computer, or a calculator, by pressing keys on a keyboard. It can be distinguished from other means of input, such as the use of pointing devices like the computer mouse, and text input via speech recognition, although its omission is always considered a mistake. French usage often includes a white space before the question mark (for example, "Que voulez-vous boire ?"). In Greek Greek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical ancient Greek literature and the New Testament of and Church Slavonic Church Slavonic is the liturgical language of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Croatian Greek Catholic Church, Macedonian Orthodox Church, Russian Orthodox Church, Ruthenian Catholic Church, Serbian Orthodox Church and other Slavic Orthodox and Slavic Greek Catholic Churches, as well as the liturgical language of Croatian and Czech Church Slavonic, a semicolon The semicolon is a punctuation mark with several uses. The Italian printer Aldus Manutius the Elder established the practice of using the semicolon mark to separate words of opposed meaning, and to indicate interdependent statements. The earliest, general use of the semicolon in English was in 1591; Ben Jonson was the first notable English writer (;) is used as a question mark.

Open circle shaped question mark

In Armenian The Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenian people. It is the official language of the Republic of Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The language is also widely spoken by Armenian communities in the Armenian diaspora. It has its own script, the Armenian alphabet the question mark (՞ ) has a form of an open circle and is placed over the last vowel of the question word.

Mirrored question mark

In Arabic Arabic (العربية al-ʿarabīyah, ( Arabic pronunciation ) or عربي ʿarabi) is a Central Semitic language, thus related to and classified alongside other Semitic languages such as Hebrew and the Neo-Aramaic languages. Arabic has more speakers than any other language in the Semitic language family. It is spoken by more than 280 million and Persian Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is widely spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and to some extent in Iraq, Bahrain, and Oman. New Persian, which usually is called also by the names of Farsi, Parsi, Dari or Parsi-ye-Dari (Dari Persian), can be classified linguistically, which are written from right to left, the question mark "؟" is mirrored right-to-left from the English question mark. (Some browsers may display the character in the previous sentence as a forward question mark due to font or text directionality issues.) Hebrew Extinct as a regularly spoken language by the 4th century CE, but survived as a liturgical and literary language; revived in the 1880s is also written right-to-left, but uses a question mark that appears on the page in the same orientation as the English "?".^[7]

Fullwidth question mark

The question mark is also used in modern writing in Chinese Chinese or the Sinitic language (汉语／漢語 Hànyǔ; 华语／華語 Huáyǔ; 中文 Zhōngwén) is a language family consisting of languages which are mostly mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages, Korean Korean is the official language of Korea, both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century a national writing system was commissioned by Sejong the Great, the system being currently called Hangul. Prior, and Japanese Japanese (日本語?, [nihoŋɡo] ) is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language family. There are a number of proposed relationships with other languages, but none of them has gained unanimous acceptance. Japanese is an agglutinative, though it is not always required in Japanese. Usually it is written as fullwidth form (？; Unicode Unicode’s Universal Character Set has a potential capacity to support over 1 million characters. Each UCS character is mapped to a code point which is an integer between 0 and 1,114,111 used to represent each character within the internal logic of text processing software: U+FF1F) in Chinese and Japanese.

Rhetorical question mark

The rhetorical question mark or "percontation point" was invented by Henry Denham in the 1580s and was used at the end of a rhetorical question A rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question posed for its persuasive effect without the expectation of a reply Rhetorical questions encourage the listener to think about what the (often obvious) answer to the question must be. When a speaker states, "How much longer must our people endure this injustice?", no; however, its use died out in the 1600s. It was the reverse of an ordinary question mark, so that instead of the main opening pointing back into the sentence, it opened away from it.^[8] This character can be represented using the reversed question mark (⸮) found in Unicode as U+2E2E. The percontation point is analogous to the "Irony mark The irony mark or irony point (French: point d’ironie; also called a snark or hook) is a proposed punctuation mark that was suggested to be used to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level (e.g. irony, sarcasm, etc.). It is illustrated by a small, elevated, backward-facing question mark. The irony mark has never been used", but these are very rarely seen.

Rhetorical questions in some (informal) situations can use a bracketed question mark, eg. "Oh, really(?)", for example in 888 subtitles Closed captioning is a term describing several systems developed to display text on a television or video screen to provide additional or interpretive information to viewers who wish to access it. Closed captions typically display a transcription of the audio portion of a program as it occurs , sometimes including non-speech elements.^[9]

The question mark can also be used as a "meta Meta- , is a prefix used in English (and other Greek-owing languages) to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter" sign to signal uncertainty regarding what precedes. It is usually put between brackets (?). The uncertainty may concern either a superficial (such as unsure spelling) or a deeper truth Truth-conditional semantics is an approach to semantics of natural language that sees the meaning of assertions as being the same as, or reducible to, their truth conditions. This approach to semantics is principally associated with Donald Davidson, and attempts to carry out for the semantics of natural language what Tarski's semantic theory of, (real meaning) level.

Computing

In computing Computing, also known as computer science, is usually defined as the activity of using and improving computer technology, computer hardware and software. It is the computer-specific part of information technology. Computer science is the study and the science of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation, the question mark character In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written form of a natural language is represented by ASCII The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text. Most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, though they support many more characters than did ASCII code 63, and is located at Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Developed in conjunction with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard, the latest version of Unicode consists of a repertoire of more than 107,000 code-point The Universal Character Set , defined by the International Standard ISO/IEC 10646, Information technology — Universal multiple-octet coded character set (UCS) (plus amendments to that standard), is a standard set of characters upon which many character encodings are based. The UCS contains nearly one hundred thousand abstract characters, each U+003F. The full-width (double-byte) equivalent, ？, is located at Unicode code point U+FF1F.

The question mark is often utilized as a wildcard character In telecommunications, a wildcard character is a character that may be substituted for any of a defined subset of all possible characters: a symbol that can be used to substitute for any other character or characters in a string In mathematical logic, more precisely in the theory of formal languages, and in computer science, a string is a sequence of symbols that are chosen from a set or alphabet.[citation needed]. In particular "?" is used as a substitute for any one character as opposed to the asterisk, "*", which can be used as a substitute for zero or more characters in a string. The inverted question mark corresponds to Unicode code-point 191 (U+00BF), and can be accessed from the keyboard in Microsoft Windows Microsoft Windows is a series of software operating systems and graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Microsoft first introduced an operating environment named Windows in November 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal on the default US layout by holding down the Alt key The Alt key on a computer keyboard is used to change the function of other pressed keys. Thus, the Alt key is a modifier key, used in a similar fashion to the Shift key. For example, simply pressing "A" will type the letter a, but if you hold down either Alt key while pressing A, the computer will perform an "Alt-A" function, and typing either 1 6 8 (ANSI) or 0 1 9 1 (Unicode) on the numeric keypad. In GNOME GNOME (abbreviation of GNU Network Object Model Environment) is a desktop environment—a graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system—composed entirely of free and open source software. It was created by two Mexican programmers, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena. It is an international project that includes creating applications, it can be entered by typing the hexadecimal Unicode character while holding ctrl-shift, i.e.: ctrl-shift BF - ¿. In recent XFree86 XFree86 is an implementation of the X Window System. It was originally written for Unix-like operating systems on IBM PC compatibles and is now available for many other operating systems and platforms. It is free and open source software under the XFree86 License version 1.1. It is developed by the XFree86 Project, Inc. The lead developer is David and X.Org incarnations of the X Window System The X Window System is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for networked computers. It provides windowing on computer displays and manages keyboard and pointing device control functions. In its standard distribution, it is a complete, albeit simple, display and human interface solution,, it can be accessed as a compose sequence of two straight question marks, i.e. pressing <Compose> ? ? yields ¿. In the Mac OS Mac OS is the trademark-protected name for a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface. The original form of what Apple would later name the "Mac OS" was the, option-shift-? produces an inverted question mark.

The question mark is used in ASCII renderings of the International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet [note 1] is a system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet, devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech pathologists and therapists, singers,, such as SAMPA in place of the glottal stop symbol, ʔ, (which resembles "?" without the dot), and corresponds to Unicode code point U+0294, Latin letter glottal stop.

In computer programming, the symbol "?" has a special meaning in many programming languages. In C-descended languages, "?" is part of the ?: operator, which is used to evaluate simple boolean conditions. In C# 2.0, the "?" modifier and the "??" operator are used to handle nullable data types. In the POSIX syntax for regular expressions, such as the one used in Perl and Python, ? stands for "zero or one instance of the previous subexpression", i.e. an optional element.

In many web browsers, "?" is used to show a character not found in the program's character set. This commonly occurs for apostrophes and quotation marks when they are written with software that uses its own proprietary non-standard code for these characters, such as Microsoft's Smart Quotes. Some fonts will instead use the Unicode Replacement Glyph (U+FFFD, ?), which is commonly rendered as a white question mark in a black diamond (see replacement character).

The generic URL syntax allows for a query string to be appended to a resource location in a web address so that additional information can be passed to a script; the query mark, ?, is used to indicate the start of a query string. A query string is usually made up of a number of different field/value pairs, each separated by the ampersand symbol, &, as seen in this url:

http://www.example.com/login.php?username=test&password=blank

Here, a script on the page login.php on the server www.example.com is to provide a response to the query string containing the pairs "username=test" and "password=blank".

Chess

In algebraic chess notation, "?" denotes a bad move, and "??" a blunder, "?!" a dubious move and "!?" an interesting move. For details of all of the chess punctuation see punctuation (chess).

Mathematics

In mathematics "?" commonly denotes Minkowski's question mark function.

Medicine

A question mark is used in English medical notes to suggest a possible diagnosis. It facilitates the recording of a doctor’s impressions regarding a patient’s symptoms and signs. For example, for a patient presenting with left lower abdominal pain, a differential diagnosis might include ?Diverticulitis (read as 'Query Diverticulitis').

See also

• Irony point
• Exclamation mark
• Interrobang

Notes

1. ^ In journalism. See Truss, Lynne. Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 2003. p. 139. ISBN 1-592-40087-6.
2. ^ Truss, Lynne. Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 2003. p. 76. ISBN 1-592-40087-6.
3. ^ M. B. Parkes, Pause and effect: punctuation in the west, ISBN 0520079418.
4. ^ The Straight Dope on the question mark (link down)
5. ^ De Hamel, Christopher History of Illuminated Manuscripts, 1997
6. ^ Brewer, E.C. Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1870 (rev. 1894), s.v. 'Punctuation'.
7. ^ Truss, Lynne. Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 2003. p. 143. ISBN 1-592-40087-6.
8. ^ Truss, Lynne. Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 2003. p. 142. ISBN 1-592-40087-6.
9. ^ The equivalent for an ironic or sarcastic statement would be a bracketed exclamation mark, eg. "Oh, really(!)".

References

• Lupton, Ellen and Miller, J. Abbott, "Period styles: a punctuated history", in The Norton Reader 11th edition, ed. Linda H. Peterson, Norton, 2003 Online excerpt (at least)
• Parkes, M.B., Pause and Effect: an Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West, University of California Press, 1993
• Truss, Lynne, Eats, Shoots & Leaves Gotham Books, NY, p. 139

External links

• The question mark and indirect questions

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