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Dictionary

Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.

punctus percontativus en · NOUN

Etymology

Latin: punctus (“point”) + percontativus (“percontative”) = “percontative point”

Meanings

  1. A reversed question mark (⸮), visually almost identical to the Arabic question mark (؟ (?)), used to mark the end of a percontative statement.
    • 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. 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
    • 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. 2005, John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook, 2nd edition, page 121:
    • 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). 2008, Alexander Humez, Nicholas D. Humez, On the Dot, page 207:
    • punctus percontativus A reversed, but not inverted punctus interrogativus […] used in the 16th and 17th centuries to indicate the end of a percontatio. 1993, Malcolm Beckwith Parkes, Pause and Effect, glossary, pages 306-307:
    • 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. 2002, Torbjörn Lundmark, Quirky QWERTY, page 147:
    • Sometimes we may be encountering the punctus percontativus, used to indicate a rhetorical question. 1998, Alastair Fowler, Paradise Lost, 2nd edition, page 9, note 4:

Relateds

percontative · percontatorial · percontation