Some other scripts have a specific question mark: Usually it is written as fullwidth form in Chinese and Japanese, in Unicode: U+FF1F ? FULLWIDTH QUESTION MARK (HTML ? ). The question mark is also used in modern writing in Chinese and, to a lesser extent, Japanese. Armenian question mark įullwidth question mark in East Asian languages Basque only uses the terminal question mark. Galician also uses the inverted opening question mark, though usually only in long sentences or in cases that would otherwise be ambiguous. The opening question mark in Unicode is U+00BF ¿ INVERTED QUESTION MARK (HTML ¿ (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: ¡¿Quién te has creído que eres?! ¡Quién te has creído que eres? – 'Who do you think you are?!' The one exception is when the question mark is matched with an exclamation mark, as in: The omission of the opening mark is common in informal writing, but is considered an error. Question marks must always be matched, but to mark uncertainty rather than actual interrogation omitting the opening one is allowed, although discouraged: Gengis Khan (❱162?–1227) is preferred in Spanish over Gengis Khan (1162?–1227) An interrogative sentence, clause, or phrase begins with an inverted question mark ¿ and ends with the question mark ?, as in:Įlla me pregunta «¿qué hora es?» – 'She asks me, "What time is it? "'
In Spanish, since the second edition of the Ortografía of the Real Academia Española in 1754, interrogatives require both opening ¿ and closing ? question marks. Genghis Khan (1162?–1227) In other languages and scripts Opening and closing question marks in Spanish This is quite common in Spanish, where the use of bracketing question marks explicitly indicates the scope of interrogation.Įn 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?')Ī question mark may also appear immediately after questionable data, such as dates: "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. However, the question mark may also occur at the end of a clause or phrase, where it replaces the comma (see also question comma):
In English, the question mark typically occurs at the end of a sentence, where it replaces the full stop (period). The Syriac question mark, known as the zagwa elaya ("upper pair") has the form of a vertical double dot over a word. 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, punctuation was rationalized by assigning Alcuin's stroke-over-dot specifically to interrogatives by this time the stroke was more sharply curved and can easily be recognized as the modern question mark.Īccording to a 2011 discovery by Chip Coakley, a Cambridge University manuscript expert, Syriac was the first language to use a punctuation mark to indicate an interrogative sentence. 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.