Question Marks

Different writing systems have different ways of marking questions. This is a tricky thing to do in some languages, because question sentences may not be marked by any additional morphemes or changes in word order, so a writing system that only encodes speech segments would fail to mark such sentences as questions. I've just run across an different and interesting method of marking questions in Armenian.

In English and many other European languages, questions are marked with, well, a question mark (see this Wikipedia article for some interesting history). This special character generally goes at the end of sentences, although in a few cases (e.g. Spanish) question sentences get a variant of the question mark both appended and prepended. This is a rather indirect method of marking questions—the mark itself is not pronounced, but serves only to mark the illocutionary force of the whole sentence (which may result in a different intonation).

The other question marking strategy I know of is in Japanese. Japanese has overt marking of questions in the form of an optional sentence-final particle (usually ka). Traditionally, therefore, questions are simply written with the usual sentence separator, although I gather it's fashionable among young Japanese to use question marks nowadays. In a way, the question particle serves as an overtly pronounced question mark, so there's no need for special punctuation. If the question particle is omitted, it's usually still possible to determine that a sentence is a question if it contains interrogatory words (i.e. the Japanese words for who, what, etc.).

There are bound to be other systems than these (feel free to describe them in the comments). Neither of the systems I've mentioned do anything to directly mark the intonation of the sentence. For example, an English question like "Did you meet him?" can be pronounced "Did you meet him?" or "Did you meet him?", with a difference in emphasis. In some languages (I know this is true of spoken French, Japanese, and to a lesser extent in English) a question can have exactly the same words in the same order as the corresponding statement—only the intonation contour differs.

The Armenian writing system marks questions by marking this intonation. The question mark is a little curlicue diacritic that goes above or next to the stressed vowel in the word in the sentence that receives the question intonation. My Armenian is sub-rudimentary, but a simple example is:

Ո՞վ է սա
[ov e sa]
Who is this?

(You can see the question diacritic after the first character in the first word, assuming your browser handles Armenian.)

The computer geek in me finds this method of marking questions appealing. Because it marks a particular word instead of the whole sentence, it contains a bit more information than the systems mentioned above and can disambiguate questions that are marked in speech only by a different intonation. There are similar diacritics for imperative sentences and for exclamations. It would be interesting to know if the exclamation mark can be used more than one time in a sentence—that would be handy for marking sentences with multiple focus stress.

[Now playing: "Beat Surrender" by The Jam]

Comments

[ben]

Latin conveys "leading" questions by adding either a suffix to the first word or an initial word which is based on the expected response. "Nonne" is used when the expected reply is positive, "Num" when negative, and "-ne" when uncertain. For example, "Venitne?" means "Is he coming?" as opposed to "Venit" - "He comes." Accordingly, "Nonne venit?" - "He is coming, isn't he?" and "Num venit ?" - "He isn't coming, is he?" While question marks are used in writing, the suffix and prepositions transformed ordinary spoken sentences into questions. (and yes, I took the examples straight from Wheelock - 2:00 am is too late to come up with original ideas...)

[Qov]

An artificial language is probably not a useful data point for you, but Klingon uses the interogative suffix -'a' (it's a as in father and the ' marks are glottal stops - I can't do IPA) on the verb of a yes/no question, and has question words like ghorgh and nuqDaq for concepts like when and where. When we write it in the latin alphabet, most people use English-style punctuation, but using another script I prefer only sentence separation marks.

[Semantic Compositions]

Doesn't the computer geek in you also have nightmares about rendering fonts where the question diacritic can appear in the same space with any character?

[The Tensor]

Nah, that's what font designers are for :). A question diacritic shouldn't be any more difficult to render than any other accent mark, and your font and rendering system really ought to be handling those already. If a question diacritic would give you trouble, that's probably the least of your worries.

It looks like the various available Armenian fonts have punted, though, since the diacritic actually appears just to the right of the vowel, rather than above it.

[PF]

Turkish, interestingly, uses one and the same marker for questions and negatives, namely mu/mü/mı/mi, only when the sentence is negative the marker goes in the verb before the tense marker, whereas for questions it goes after the tense marker but before the marker of person (except in third person), and the whole question marker/person marker is written separately from the verb.

That's only in yes/no questions - other questions have a what/when/how/how much etc question word in them somewhere to indicate question marking.

Of course modern Turkish uses the ?, but Ottoman Turkish didn't - I don't know if there's a question marker in Arabic, but if there was, it was undoubtably used in Turkish.

For some reason or other I don't think there was a question marker in old Mongolian, but both Mongolian and Buryat have a "I'm expecting a yes or a no answer" marker like Turkish does, and question words for the other cases.

[NW]

This is probably a syncretism in Turkish, as Chaghatay (Classical Uzbek) had ma/mä for the negative but mu/mü for the question.

[Pekka Karjalainen]

Yay, I get to explain Finnish questions. We have a question particle that attaches at the end of words. It's either -ko, or -kö with a front vowel, depending on vowel harmony.

Let's take a sentence that describes what I am doing now.

Minä kirjoita-n nyt kommenti-n.
1P write-ind.pre.1P now comment-gen/acc.
I am writing a comment now.

Now we play a game of add the particle and front the word:

Minäkö kirjoitan nyt kommentin?
Is it *me* that is writing a comment now?

Kirjoitanko minä nyt kommentin?
Shall I *write* a comment now?

Nytkö minä kirjoitan kommentin?
Is it *now* that I should write a comment?

Kommentinko minä nyt kirjoitan?
Is it a *comment* I should write now?

Instead of the word order and clefting (term?) tricks, you could just use intonation to get the same effect in English. My translations exaggerate a bit for effect. The idea is that you add the particle to the item you question, and perhaps contrast with other options.

Only one particle per sentence is normally allowed and the word of phrase it gets added to is fronted. Neat little thingy, it is.

[Panu]

Hope I am not being cheeky, but IMHO the correct word order is "sa ov e".