Forum: Linguistics
Topic: Spanish punctuation - inversion of '?' and '!'
Poster: GoodWords
Post title: Answers
An answer is given here.
Some highlights:
"The inverted question mark was not adopted until long after the decision of the Real Academia in the second edition of La Ortografía de la Real Academia (1754) to recommend it as the symbol indicating the beginning of a question in written Spanish. The Real Academia also ordered the same system for statements of exclamation using the symbols '¡' and '!'.
"Adoption of these new rules was slow, and there are even books from the nineteenth century that do not use either of the opening symbols, '¡' or '¿'. It did finally become standard usage, most likely due to its practicality given that Spanish syntax in many cases does not help the reader determine at what moment a sentence in progress is a question."
An additional point of interest not noted in the article is that when a sentence contains a question or exclamation, but the question or exclamation does not make up the whole sentence, the question or exclamation alone may be enclosed in the appropriate punctuation marks. If we did this in English, it would look like this:
It's a good idea, ¿isn't it?
Topic: Spanish punctuation - inversion of '?' and '!'
Poster: GoodWords
Post title: Answers
An answer is given here.
Some highlights:
"The inverted question mark was not adopted until long after the decision of the Real Academia in the second edition of La Ortografía de la Real Academia (1754) to recommend it as the symbol indicating the beginning of a question in written Spanish. The Real Academia also ordered the same system for statements of exclamation using the symbols '¡' and '!'.
"Adoption of these new rules was slow, and there are even books from the nineteenth century that do not use either of the opening symbols, '¡' or '¿'. It did finally become standard usage, most likely due to its practicality given that Spanish syntax in many cases does not help the reader determine at what moment a sentence in progress is a question."
An additional point of interest not noted in the article is that when a sentence contains a question or exclamation, but the question or exclamation does not make up the whole sentence, the question or exclamation alone may be enclosed in the appropriate punctuation marks. If we did this in English, it would look like this:
It's a good idea, ¿isn't it?