Question mark

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.

[2][3] From around 783, in Godescalc Evangelistary, a mark described as "a lightning flash, striking from right to left" is attested.

[4] 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.

[6][7] 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.

[9]) In 1598, the English term point of interrogation is attested in an Italian–English dictionary by John Florio.

The long and hard name is the Interrogation Point.In English, the question mark typically occurs at the end of a sentence, where it replaces the full stop (period).

Galician also uses the inverted opening question mark, though usually only in long sentences or in cases that would otherwise be ambiguous.

?Solomon Aelan hemi barava gudfala kandre, ia man?

[18] It was adopted by Church Slavonic and eventually settled on a form essentially similar to the Latin semicolon.

Some browsers may display the character in the previous sentence as a forward question mark due to font or text directionality issues.

The Arabic question mark is also used in some other right-to-left scripts: Dhivehi,[20] N'Ko,[21] Syriac,[22] and Adlam.

[24] The question mark is also used in modern writing in Chinese and, to a lesser extent, Japanese.

[28] Japanese has an interrogative particle, か (ka), which functions grammatically like a question mark.

Therefore, the question mark is not historically used Japanese, and still not officially sanctioned for use in government publications or school textbooks, but its popularity has been gradually increasing among younger people.

"); in English orthography, no space appears in front of the question mark (e.g. "What would you like to drink?").

The uncertainty may concern either a superficial level (such as unsure spelling), or a deeper truth (real meaning).

The full-width (double-byte) equivalent (？), is located at code-point U+FF1F ？ FULLWIDTH QUESTION MARK.

[35] The inverted question mark (¿) corresponds to Unicode code-point U+00BF ¿ INVERTED QUESTION MARK (¿), and can be accessed from the keyboard in Microsoft Windows on the default US layout by holding down the Alt and typing either 1 6 8 (ANSI) or 0 1 9 1 (Unicode) on the numeric keypad.

In GNOME applications on Linux operating systems, it can be entered by typing the hexadecimal Unicode character (minus leading zeros) while holding down both Ctrl and Shift, i.e.: Ctrl Shift B F. In recent XFree86 and X.Org incarnations of the X Window System, it can be accessed as a compose sequence of two straight question marks, i.e. pressing Compose ? ?

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.

character may be used as a shorthand for the "print" function; in others (notably the BBC BASIC family), ?

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 Office's "smart quotes".

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/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.

In linear logic, the question mark denotes one of the exponential modalities that control weakening and contraction.