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Who Invented the Question Mark?
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 email Michael Z.
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I remember rather fondly my first experience with the Spanish question mark. Not that it differed from the English question mark, but that it appeared at the beginning of a sentence, and upside down! What a marvelous idea!
It was at the Steinway Library, in Queens, of course, where I found myself leafing through a picture book, maybe not even five years-old.
The book had cows and pigs and chickens in it, and the wonderful upside down question mark, which warned you, from the beginning, that this sentence was about to get all interrogative on you.
Why hadn't English adapted this use of the upside question mark? Wouldn't this sentence have read better if you knew, from the beginning, that'd I be asking you, at the end?
?No? ?Yes? ?Maybe? Damn, it's just not the same if they're not upside down.
Question Mark. It Mean Greek for...
Shortly after learning of the upside-down Spanish question mark, I'd be enrolled in Greek school, where I would learn something that I'd forget for many years until I visited Greece again as an adult.
Greeks don't have question marks.
How do they ask questions then? Funny you should ask. (No question mark there.)
Greeks use semi-colons.
What;
That's right. Semi-colons. If a Greek asks a question, they end it with that pathetic, wimpy symbol. You've got to be kidding, right;
Nope. It's true. Greek, one of the oldest written languages in the world (and certainly the oldest of the European languages) does not have questions marks.
With the question mark, I'm left to wonder, like communism and deodorant, if the Greeks didn't invent it, then who did?
An Outrageous Claim
Nobody knows for sure who invented the question mark, but there are two prevailing theories.
One is that it is derivative of the Latin "quaestro," abbreviated to Qo in the middle ages. Allegedly, the "Qo" was written with the "Q" on top of the "o," which eventually led to the this mark: "?"
A competing theory finds the question mark's origin in the 9th-century, where the period, indicating the stop of a sentence, would be accented by a vertical tilde, to connote a speaker's voice arising.
But a third theory suggests that the question mark and the semi-colon have much in common. The semi-colon denoted questions in ancient Greek, and it is supposed that other languages simply took the semi-colon and flipped it upside down.
; became ?
Do you see it; Is it obvious?
Where the East meets West
That the European languages would share punctuation is not impressive. Europeans have been conquering, trading, and screwing each other for several thousand years. Why wouldn't they share punctuation?
But for the question mark to appear in Chinese and Japanese begs the question: how did it get there?
In Chinese, again, the answer isn't clear, and it's made all the more odd by the fact that Chinese already has characters that indicate questions.
The question mark is redundant!
Japanese already knows this and because of the "ka" suffix, that often appears at the end of interrogative sentences, the question mark is not required.
Other Asian languages, like Burmese, have their own question mark. Though it should be noted that Hindi does use the question mark, but has a vertical line to denote the end of a sentence instead of a period.
How Do You Know?
The problem with looking up "question mark" and "Chinese" on google, is that most of the hits it returns are related to computer coding.
A Chinese character, if an operating system doesn't have the right fonts installed, will simply show up as a question mark.
A problem that is true of many languages, proving "question mark Japanese" to be just as challenging a search.
(That "question" and "mark" would produce returns such as "mark this question" was rectified by quoting "question mark." So no problem there.)
Wikipedia proved useful for some cursory theories on the origins of the question mark, but was otherwise lacking in depth. Is there anyone out there that can add to the page?
I'd like to know, for instance, what the Babylonians did for question marks. Did cuneiform have it? What about the Egyptians? Is there a question mark in hieroglyphics?
I'm swimming in questions. And yet, no answers?
Enough Is Enough
As a native English speak, the Greek lack of a question mark bothered me. The semi-colon is not adequate enough a punctuation to do the question justice.
It serves just fine for meeker interrogation. "Please sir, can I have some more;"
But the semi-colon would utterly fail a detective: "Where were you on the night of July 7th, 1982;"
It'd be a pushover for a litigator: "Did you order a code red;" And would prove an embarrassment to a decorated Marine: "You want the truth; You can't handle the truth."
No, the semi-colon is not adequate. And to add insult to injury, it's not even versatile. Sometimes sentences require not only interrogative points, but also exclamation points.
"Why do I have to be Mister Pink?!"
That question is not served with just a question. It requires the exclamation point. It'd be naked without it.
The Posture of a Date
Let us then compare the question mark with the semi-colon in concert with an exclamation point. Which is prettier:
"?!"
or,
";!"
In the first relationship (?!), the question mark is the female. She has curves, and she balances the rigidity of the male exclamation point, which is strong and to attention.
On the other hand, with (;!), it is the exclamation point that is female! She is the slender sexy one, compared to the plodding, ugly semi-colon.
In this pairing, the semi-colon plays the part of the short, stocky investment banker, and the exclamation point his runway model trophy wife.
With all this in mind, isn't it time for the Greeks to abandon the semi-colon and accept the question mark as a logical improvement over their current punctuation;
But as much as I'd like Greek to adapt the question mark, it'd be even better if English turned theirs upside-down.
?Right? ?Right? Damn, still doesn't work. |
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