Question mark
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Question mark | |||||||
U+003F ? QUESTION MARK (?) | |||||||
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The question mark ? (also known as interrogation point, query, or eroteme in
History
In the fifth century,
From around 783, in
From the 10th century, the pitch-defining element (if it ever existed) seems to have been gradually forgotten, so that the "lightning flash" sign (with the stroke sometimes slightly curved) is often seen indifferently at the end of clauses, whether they embody a question or not.[citation needed]
In the early 13th century, when the growth of communities of scholars (universities) in Paris and other major cities led to an expansion and streamlining of the book-production trade,[8] punctuation was rationalized by assigning the "lightning flash" specifically to interrogatives; by this time the stroke was more sharply curved and can easily be recognized as the modern question mark. (See, for example, De Aetna (1496) printed by Aldo Manuzio in Venice.[9])
In 1598, the English term point of interrogation is attested in an Italian–English dictionary by John Florio.[10]
In the 1850s, the term question mark is attested:[11]
The mark which you are to notice in this lesson is of this shape ? You see it is made by placing a little crooked mark over a period.... The name of this mark is the Question Mark, because it is always put after a question. Sometimes it is called by a longer and harder name. The long and hard name is the Interrogation Point.
Scope
In English, the question mark typically occurs at the end of a sentence, where it replaces the
- "Is it good in form? style? meaning?"
or:
- "Showing off for him, for all of them, not out of hubris—hubris? him? what did he have to be hubrid about?—but from mood and nervousness." — Stanley Elkin.[12]
This is quite common in
- En el caso de que no puedas ir con ellos, ¿quieres ir con nosotros? ('In case you cannot go with them, would you like to go with us?')
A question mark may also appear immediately after questionable data, such as dates:
- Genghis Khan (1162?–1227)
In other languages and scripts
Opening and closing question marks in Spanish
In Spanish, since the second edition of the Ortografía of the
- Ella me pregunta «¿qué hora es?» – 'She asks me, "What time is it?"'
Question marks must always be matched, but to mark uncertainty rather than actual interrogation omitting the opening one is allowed, although discouraged:[15]
- Gengis Khan (¿1162?–1227) is preferred in Spanish over Gengis Khan (1162?–1227)
The omission of the opening mark is common in informal writing, but is considered an error. The one exception is when the question mark is matched with an exclamation mark, as in:
- ¡Quién te has creído que eres? – 'Who do you think you are?!'
(The order may also be reversed, opening with a question mark and closing with an exclamation mark.) Nonetheless, even here the Academia recommends matching punctuation:[16]
- ¡¿Quién te has creído que eres?!
The opening question mark in Unicode is U+00BF ¿ INVERTED QUESTION MARK (¿).
In other languages of Spain
Galician also uses the inverted opening question mark, though usually only in long sentences or in cases that would otherwise be ambiguous. Basque and Catalan, however, use only the terminal question mark.[clarification needed]
Solomon Islands Pidgin
In
?Solomon Aelan hemi barava gudfala kandre, ia man? ('Solomon Islands is a great country, isn't it?')[17]
Armenian question mark
In Armenian, the question mark is a diacritic that takes the form of an open circle and is placed over the last vowel of the question word. It is defined in Unicode at U+055E ◌՞ ARMENIAN QUESTION MARK.
Greek question mark
The
Mirrored question mark in right-to-left scripts
In
The Arabic question mark is also used in some other right-to-left scripts:
. Adlam also has U+1E95F 𞥟Hebrew script is also written right-to-left, but it uses a question mark that appears on the page in the same orientation (e.g. את מדברת עברית?) as the left-to-right question mark.[21]
Fullwidth question mark in East Asian languages
The question mark is also used in modern writing in
In other scripts
Some other scripts have a specific question mark:
- U+1367 ፧ ETHIOPIC QUESTION MARK
- U+A60F ꘏ VAI QUESTION MARK
- U+2CFA ⳺ COPTIC OLD NUBIAN DIRECT QUESTION MARK, and U+2CFB ⳻ COPTIC OLD NUBIAN INDIRECT QUESTION MARK
- U+1945 ᥅ LIMBU QUESTION MARK
Stylistic variants
Typological variants of "?"
The rhetorical question mark or percontation point (see Irony punctuation) was invented by Henry Denham in the 1580s and was used at the end of a rhetorical question;[24] however, it became obsolete in the 17th century. 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.[24] This character can be represented using the reversed question mark ⸮ found at Unicode as U+2E2E.
Bracketed question marks can be used for rhetorical questions, for example Oh, really(?), in informal contexts such as closed captioning.
The question mark can also be used as a
In typography, some other variants and combinations are available: "⁇," "⁈," and "⁉," are usually used for chess annotation symbols; the interrobang, "‽," is used to combine the functions of the question mark[25] and the exclamation mark, superposing these two marks.
Unicode makes available these variants:
- U+2047 ⁇ DOUBLE QUESTION MARK
- U+2048 ⁈ QUESTION EXCLAMATION MARK
- U+2049 ⁉ EXCLAMATION QUESTION MARK
- ⁉️ with an emoji variation selector
- ⁉️ with an
- U+203D ‽ INTERROBANG
- U+2E18 ⸘ INVERTED INTERROBANG
- U+2E2E ⸮ REVERSED QUESTION MARK
- U+061F ؟ ARABIC QUESTION MARK
- U+FE56 ﹖ SMALL QUESTION MARK
- U+00BF ¿ INVERTED QUESTION MARK (¿)
- U+2753 ❓ BLACK QUESTION MARK ORNAMENT
- U+2754 ❔ WHITE QUESTION MARK ORNAMENT
- U+1F679 🙹 HEAVY INTERROBANG ORNAMENT
- U+1F67A 🙺 SANS-SERIF INTERROBANG ORNAMENT
- U+1F67B 🙻 HEAVY SANS-SERIF INTERROBANG ORNAMENT
Computing
In computing, the question mark character is represented by ASCII code 63 (0x3F hexadecimal), and is located at Unicode code-point U+003F ? QUESTION MARK (?). The full-width (double-byte) equivalent (?), is located at code-point U+FF1F ? FULLWIDTH QUESTION MARK.[26]
The
In shell and scripting languages, the question mark is often utilized as a wildcard character: a symbol that can be used to substitute for any other character or characters in a string. In particular, filename globbing uses "?" as a substitute for any one character, as opposed to the asterisk, "*", which matches zero or more characters in a string.
The question mark is used in ASCII renderings of the International Phonetic Alphabet, such as SAMPA, in place of the glottal stop symbol, ʔ, (which resembles "?" without the dot), and corresponds to Unicode code point U+0294 ʔ LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP.
In
?:
operator, which is used to evaluate simple boolean conditions. In C# 2.0, the ?
modifier is used to handle nullable data types and ??
is the null coalescing operator. In the POSIX syntax for regular expressions, such as that used in Perl and Python, ?
stands for "zero or one instance of the previous subexpression", i.e. an optional element. It can also make a quantifier like {x,y}
, +
or *
match as few characters as possible, making it lazy, e.g. /^.*?px/
will match the substring 165px
in 165px 17px
instead of matching 165px 17px
.[a] In certain implementations of the BASIC programming language, the ?
character may be used as a shorthand for the "print" function; in others (notably the BBC BASIC family), ?
is used to address a single-byte memory location. In OCaml, the question mark precedes the label for an optional parameter. In Scheme, as a convention, symbol names ending in ?
are used for predicates, such as odd?
, null?
, and eq?
. Similarly, in Ruby, method names ending in ?
are used for predicates. In Swift a type followed by ?
denotes an option type; ?
is also used in "optional chaining", where if an option value is nil, it ignores the following operations. Similarly, in Kotlin, a type followed by ?
is nullable and functions similar to option chaining are supported. In APL, ?
generates random numbers or a random subset of indices. In Rust, a ?
suffix on a function or method call indicates error handling. In SPARQL, the question mark is used to introduce variable names, such as ?name
. In MUMPSIn many
The generic
?
, 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&
, as seen in this URL:
http://www.example.com/search.php?query=testing&database=English
Here, a script on the page search.php on the server www.example.com is to provide a response to the query string containing the pairs query=testing and database=English.
Games
In
In Scrabble, a question mark indicates a blank tile.[27]
Linguistics
In most areas of
Other sources go further and use several symbols (e.g. the question mark and the asterisk plus ?*
or the degree symbol °
) to indicate gradations or a continuum of acceptability.[c]
Yet others use double question marks ??
to indicate a degree of strangeness between those indicated by a single question mark and that indicated by the combination of question mark and asterisk.[33][34]
Mathematics and formal logic
In
In linear logic, the question mark denotes one of the exponential modalities that control weakening and contraction.
When placed above the relational symbol in an equation or inequality, a question-mark annotation means that the stated relation is "questioned". This can be used to ask whether the relation might be true or to point out the relation's possible invalidity.
- U+225F ≟ QUESTIONED EQUAL TO
- U+2A7B ⩻ LESS-THAN WITH QUESTION MARK ABOVE
- U+2A7C ⩼ GREATER-THAN WITH QUESTION MARK ABOVE
Medicine
A question mark is used in English medical notes to suggest a possible
See also
- Betteridge's law of headlines – Journalistic adage on questions in headlines
- Cosmic "Question Mark"
- High rising terminal – An intonation pattern in some varieties of English ('upspeak', 'uptalk')
- Inquiry – Any process that has the aim of augmenting knowledge, resolving doubt, or solving a problem
- Interrobang – Combined question mark and exclamation mark
- Irony punctuation – Proposed form of notation used to denote irony or sarcasm in text
- List of typographical symbols and punctuation marks
- Terminal punctuation – Marks that identify the end of some text
Notes
- ^ The Perl Compatible Regular Expressions library implements the
U
flag, which reverses behavior of quantifiers: these become lazy by default, and?
can make them greedy. - ^ One article notes succintly that "common practice in linguistics [is that] an asterisk preceding a word, a clause or a sentence is used to indicate ungrammaticality or unacceptability, while a question mark is used to indicate questionable usage",[28]: 15 another that, "A question mark indicates that the example is marginal; an asterisk indicates unacceptability"[29]: 409 and another that "examples preceded by an asterisk are ungrammatical, and those preceded by a question mark would be considered strange".[30]: 623
- ^ One example is "rough approximations of acceptability are given in four gradations and indicated as follows: normal and preferred, no mark; acceptable but not preferred, degree sign
°
; marginally acceptable, question mark (?
); unacceptable, asterisk (*
)."[32]: 123–24
References
- ^ Truss 2003, p. 139.
- ^ "The riddle of the Syriac double dot: it's the world's earliest question mark". University of Cambridge. 2011-07-21. Archived from the original on 2022-11-01. Retrieved 2022-11-01.
- ^ "Symbol in Syriac may be world's first question mark". Reuters. 2011-07-21. Archived from the original on 2022-11-01. Retrieved 2022-11-01.
- ^ a b "The Grammarphobia Blog: Who invented the question mark?". www.grammarphobia.com. 2022-02-28. Archived from the original on 2022-11-01. Retrieved 2022-11-01.
- ^ Truss 2003, p. 159.
- ISBN 0-520-07941-8.
- ^ The Straight Dope on the question mark Archived July 11, 2007, at the Wayback Machine (link down)
- ^ De Hamel, Christopher History of Illuminated Manuscripts, 1997
- ^ Bembo, Pietro (1495–1496). De Aetna. Venice: Aldo Pio Manuzio. f. 4v.
- ^ Florio, John (1598). A worlde of wordes, or, Most copious, and exact dictionarie in Italian and English. London: By Arnold Hatfield for Edw. Blount. p. 188.
Iterogatiuo punto, a point of interrogation.
- .
- ^ Elkin, Stanley (1991). The MacGuffin. p. 173.
- ^ Truss 2003, p. 142–143.
- Real Academia Española. 1779 [1754] – via Internet Archive.
- ^ Interrogación y exclamación (signos de). Punto 3d.
- ^ Interrogación y exclamación (signos de). Punto 3b.
- ISBN 0864425872.
- ^ Thompson, Edward Maunde (1912). An Introduction to Greek and Latin Palaiography. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 60 ff. Retrieved December 10, 2017 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ Nicolas, Nick (November 20, 2014). "Greek Unicode Issues: Punctuation". Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: A Digital Library of Greek Literature. University of California, Irvine. Archived from the original on January 18, 2015.". 2005. Accessed 7 October 2014.
- ^ "Adlam/Pular orthography notes". r12a.github.io. 5 January 2023. Archived from the original on 16 January 2023. Retrieved 16 January 2023.
- ^ Truss 2003, p. 143.
- ISBN 978-2-7433-0482-9..
- ^ "Learn English Punctuation - English Punctuation Rules". www.learnenglish.de. Retrieved 2024-02-20.
- ^ a b Truss 2003, p. 142.
- ^ Mandeville, Henry (1851). A Course of Reading for Common Schools and the Lower Classes of Academies. Retrieved November 22, 2013.
- ^ "Character Codes – HTML Codes, Hexadecimal Codes & HTML Names". Character-Code.com. Archived from the original on August 7, 2016. Retrieved August 7, 2016.
- ^ "Scrabble Glossary". Tucson Scrabble Club. Archived from the original on August 30, 2011. Retrieved February 6, 2012.
- JSTOR 23826160. Retrieved 5 September 2023.
- JSTOR 2941036. Retrieved 5 September 2023.
- S2CID 2223235. Retrieved 5 September 2023.
- . Retrieved 5 September 2023.
- JSTOR 306765. Retrieved 5 September 2023.
- ISBN 0-415-08627-2.
- ISBN 0-521-38104-5.
Bibliography
- Truss, Lynne (2003). ISBN 1861976127.
- Lupton, Ellen; Miller, J. Abbott (2003). "Period Styles: A Punctuated History" (PDF). In Peterson, Linda H. (ed.). The Norton Reader (11th ed.). Norton. Archived from the original (PDF) on June 14, 2007. Retrieved December 10, 2017 – via Think-gn.com – online excerpt (at least – may be full text of chapter), pp. 3–7.
External links
- "The Question Mark". Guide to Grammar & Writing. Hartford, Connecticut: Capital Community College Foundation. 2004. Archived from the original on 8 September 2006. Retrieved 10 December 2017. – provides an overview of question mark usage, and the differences between direct, indirect, and rhetorical questions.