punctus percontativus
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
Latin: punctus (“point”) + percontativus (“percontative”) = “percontative point”
Noun[edit]
- A reversed question mark (⸮), visually almost identical to the Arabic question mark (؟ (?)), used to mark the end of a percontative statement.
- 1993, Malcolm Beckwith Parkes, Pause and Effect, glossary, pages 306-307:
- punctus percontativus A reversed, but not inverted punctus interrogativus […] used in the 16th and 17th centuries to indicate the end of a percontatio.
- 1995, Julia Briggs, “‘The Lady Vanishes’: Problems of Authorship and Editing in the Middleton Canon” in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society II: 1992–1996 (1998), ed. William Speed Hill, page 115:
- These include Middleton’s […] idiosyncratic placing of apostrophes and deployment of punctuation marks — exclamation marks, question marks and a form of reversed question mark which Malcolm Parkes classifies as “punctus percontativus,” associated […] with rhetorical questions.
- 1998, Alastair Fowler, Paradise Lost, 2nd edition, page 9, note 4:
- Sometimes we may be encountering the punctus percontativus, used to indicate a rhetorical question.
- 2002, Torbjörn Lundmark, Quirky QWERTY, page 147:
- The medieval question mark had an additional function that has since been lost: a mirror-reversed question mark (called punctus percontativus) signified a rhetorical question that did not expect a direct answer.
- 2005, John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook, 2nd edition, page 121:
- The percontation-mark (or punctus percontativus), the standard Arabic question-mark, indicated ‘percontations’, questions open to any answer or (more loosely) ‘rhetorical questions’, in various books of c.1575–c.1625.
- 2008, Alexander Humez, Nicholas D. Humez, On the Dot, page 207:
- question mark in Arabic (؟) — Unicode U+061F: A similar mark has been proposed for Unicode that would be identical to the punctus percontativus found in some medieval Western manuscripts whose purpose was to indicate a merely rhetorical question rather than one requiring or at least expecting an answer: “What was the use of sending you to school⸮” (Michael Everson et al., “Proposal to add Medievalist and Iranianist punctuation characters to the UCS” (p. 2).
- For more quotations using this term, see Citations:punctus percontativus.
Usage notes[edit]
- Possible calques of punctus percontativus include percontation mark and percontation point; both are attested in isolated uses (2005, 2010), but neither has gained any currency.