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Concept
Question mark
Summary
The question mark (also known as interrogation point, query, or eroteme in journalism) is a punctuation mark that indicates an interrogative clause or phrase in many languages.
In the fifth century, Syriac Bible manuscripts used question markers, according to a 2011 theory by manuscript specialist Chip Coakley: he believes the zagwa elaya ("upper pair"), a vertical double dot over a word at the start of a sentence, indicates that the sentence is a question.
From around 783, in Godescalc Evangelistary, a mark described as "a lightning flash, striking from right to left" is attested. This mark is later called a punctus interrogativus. According to some paleographers, it may have indicated intonation, perhaps associated with early musical notation like neumes. Another theory, is that the "lightning flash" was originally a tilde or titlo, as in , one of many wavy or more or less slanted marks used in medieval texts for denoting things such as abbreviations, which would later become various diacritics or ligatures.
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.
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 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 it (1496) printed by Aldo Manuzio in Venice.
In 1598, the English term point of interrogation is attested in an Italian–English dictionary by John Florio.
In the 1850s, the term question mark is attested:
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. [.
Official source
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