Upside-down question and exclamation marks: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:18, 27 June 2025

Revision as of 12:18, 1 July 2025

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Upside-down marks, simple in the era of hand typesetting, were originally recommended by the {{Lang|es|[[Royal Spanish Academy|Real Academia Española]]}} (Royal Spanish Academy), in the second edition of the {{lang|es|Ortografía de la lengua castellana}} (Orthography of the Castilian language) in 1754<ref>{{cite web|title=Ediciones de la Ortografía Académica|trans-title=Editions of the Academic Orthography |url=http://www.rae.es/sites/default/files/Tabla_ediciones_Ortografia.pdf|publisher=Real Academia Española|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230617020907/https://www.rae.es/sites/default/files/Tabla_ediciones_Ortografia.pdf|archive-date=June 17, 2023}}</ref> recommending it as the symbol indicating the beginning of a question in written Spanish—e.g. {{lang|es|"¿Cuántos años tienes?"|italic=yes}} ("How old are you?"; {{lit|How many years do you have?|}}). The Real Academia also ordered the same upside-down-symbol system for statements of exclamation, using the symbols "¡" and "!".

These new rules were slow to be adopted: there are 19th-century books in which the printer uses neither "¡" nor "¿".<ref>{{cite web |last1=Carrithers|first1=Michael|last2=Candea|first2=Matei|last3=Sykes|first3=Karen|last4=Holbraad|first4=Martin|last5=Venkatesan|first5=Soumya|date=May 28, 2010|title=Ontology is just another word for culture |url=https://archive.phtoday/tpas420250626220935/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308275X09364070|url-access=subscription|website=[[Critique of Anthropology]]|publisher=[[Sage Journals]]|archive-url=https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x09364070|archive-date=June 26, 2025 |access-date=June 26, 2025}}</ref>

Outside of the Spanish-speaking world, [[John Wilkins]] proposed using the upside-down exclamation mark "¡" as a symbol at the end of a sentence to [[irony punctuation|denote irony]] in 1668. He was one of many, including [[Desiderius Erasmus]], who felt there was a need for such a punctuation mark, but Wilkins' proposal, like the other attempts, failed to take hold.<ref name="Houston2013">{{cite book|first=Keith|last=Houston|title=Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3R2SAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA214|date=September 24, 2013|publisher=[[W. W. Norton]]|access-date=September 1, 2014|isbn=978-0-393-24154-9