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A Staff Report by the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board

What's the origin of the question mark?

12-Jun-2007

Dear Straight Dope:

Where did the question mark (?) originate? —Tom Kracun, Chicago

SDSTAFF Gfactor replies:

Let's get one thing out of the way right off the bat: It didn't originate with cats.

A claim you'll find on some cat fanciers' Web sites is that the ancient Egyptians based the question mark and exclamation point on the cat's tail. The idea here is that a curious cat curls its tail like a question mark, while an excited or angry cat will straighten its tail like an exclamation point. You can guess for yourself what the period beneath the "tail" represents.

This theory needless to say is malarkey. In the beginning, there was no punctuation. So says Malcolm Parkes in Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (1993):

In Antiquity the written word was regarded as a record of the spoken word, and texts were usually read aloud. But from the sixth century onwards attitudes to the written word changed: writing came to be regarded as conveying information directly to the mind through the eye … New conventions, such as word separation, features of layout and punctuation, were developed to make it easier for readers to extract the information conveyed in the written medium.

During the Middle Ages, Parkes notes, Latin became the common tongue of Europe. Punctuation and other conventions were developed to help those learning Latin as a foreign language. "Punctuation became an essential component of written language. Its primary function is to resolve structural uncertainties in a text, and to signal nuances of semantic significance which might otherwise not be conveyed at all, or would at best be much more difficult for a reader to figure out."

Early punctuation wasn't inserted by the author but added later by others. Before the sixth century, most works were dictated to scribes, who tried to record mechanically what was said. While major sections of a work were separated by layout features like chapters and paragraphs, text within divisions ran together. First-century Latin texts separated words with dots called interpuncts (·) but apparently the practice died out by the end of the century. After that, the Romans did it like the Greeks – in scripto continua – "without separating the words or indicating any pauses within a major section of the text," says Parkes.

Interpreting such a text was the job of the reader, who had to study the work prior to reading it aloud to determine word breaks and pauses. Often readers marked the text for this purpose, mostly with interpuncts and pause indications. These "lesson signs" were the first real punctuation, used by students, teachers, and later editors and commentators. Fourth-century grammarian Donatus recommended a system of punctuation that included three puncti or distinctiones roughly corresponding to our comma, colon, and period. These indicated brief, middling, and extended pauses, where readers could catch their breath. Donatus didn't invent these marks – according to Parkes, a similar system was "probably used … by Probus in the first century and by Fronto in the second."

In time, lesson signs came to be seen as a valuable addition to a manuscript. Texts annotated in this way were called codices distincti. Liturgical works intended to be read aloud during religious services were routinely punctuated.

At the beginning of the seventh century, silent reading came into vogue. Punctuation proved to be just as useful to lone scholars perusing texts in the library as it had been to earlier readers declaiming them before a congregation. The main difference was that where before punctuation had been used to indicate pauses when reading aloud, now it was increasingly used to clarify syntax and meaning. In Libri etymologiarum, Isodore of Seville endorsed silent reading and introduced an improved system of punctuation based on that of Donatus. Isodore's system took hold; new works subsequently were produced with punctuation from the start.

The question mark first appeared in the eighth century. It was called the punctus interrogativus. Its form took a while to jell, but the general idea was a wavy line slanted up to the right over a dot.

Some have suggested that the question mark and other punctuation are derived from a medieval music notation system called neumes. In his book With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How It Was Made (2003), Leo Treitler reviews the evidence and suggests that both neumes and punctuation derived from lesson signs – punctuation had been around before neumes came into common use. He says, "The origin of the lesson signs – which are but punctuation marks in ecclesiastical texts – is the same as the origin of post-eighth century punctuation altogether: invention and normalization by French scribes as an aspect of the reform of language-writing technology."

In the 17th century the squiggly question mark was replaced by printers with the one we know today. According to Lynne Truss in Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2004), there was some question what it ought to look like: "In its traditional orientation, with the curve to the right, it appears to cup an ear towards the preceding prose … But people have always played around with it." She notes that a printer named Henry Denham once suggested reversing the mark for rhetorical questions, a notion that luckily never caught on. One tweak that did was the practice of beginning an interrogative sentence in Spanish with an inverted question mark (Ώ) – exclamations are similarly treated – and ending it with a regular one. The Real Academia Espaρola adopted the change in 1754.

All that remained after that was for some latter-day pet lover to note the resemblance to cats.

References

Baker, Peter, The Electronic Introduction to Old English, (2003): http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/mss.html

Blood, Brian, Music Theory Online: notes & rests: http://www.dolmetsch.com/musictheory2.htm#origin 

Crystal, David, ed., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (2d ed. 2003)

Floros, Constantin, Introduction to Early Medieval Notation (2005)

Parkes, Malcolm, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (1993)

Reimer, Stephen, Manuscript Studies – Medieval and Early Modern, University of Alberta, 1998: http://www.ualberta.ca/~sreimer/ms-course/course/punc.htm

Treitler, Leo, With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How It Was Made (2003)

Truss, Lynne, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (2003)

—SDSTAFF Gfactor
Straight Dope Science Advisory Board

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Staff Reports are researched and written by members of the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board, Cecil's online auxiliary. Although the SDSAB does its best, these articles are edited by Ed Zotti, not Cecil, so accuracywise you'd better keep your fingers crossed.

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