punctus percontativus

English

Etymology

(deprecated template usage) [etyl] Latin: (deprecated template usage) punctus + (deprecated template usage) percontativus = “percontative point”

Noun

punctus percontativus (plural *punctūs percontativi)

1. A reversed question mark: 〈⸮〉, visually almost identical to the Arabic question mark: 〈؟ (?)〉, used to mark the end of a percontative statement; a rhetorical question mark.
   • 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 in Paradise Lost (2nd ed.), 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 ed.), 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 and Nicholas D. Humez, On the Dot, page 207

     question mark in Arabic (Template:Arab) — 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).

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Usage notes

• Possible calques of (deprecated template usage) punctus percontativus include (deprecated template usage) percontation mark‎ and (deprecated template usage) percontation point; both are attested in isolated uses (2005, 2010), but neither has gained any currency.

Related terms

• percontation

• percontative

• percontatorial