How come the Hebrew settings on my computer insist on putting the question mark at the beginning of a sentence

Question

שלומת מה שלומך?

See, I typed the question mark at the end, but it put it at the beginning. Everything seems to go from right to left correctly except for that! It's so annoying. How can I fix it?

that tav was a typo at the end of shalom.

Yes, I know it is from right to left. That's the problem. It puts the question mark at the beginning instead of the end.

Answer 1

First of all, you forgot to use the final form of the "mem" at the end of "shalom" in addition to adding the "taf"...

In answer to your question, however, the reason is that in Unicode, which is the most common form of encoding today (and Yahoo Answers definitely uses Unicode), the way Hebrew works is that each Hebrew letter is marked as a "right-to-left" character. The question mark, however, is a "normal" character. If you had wanted to put a Hebrew word or two into an English text, you would *want* the non-Hebrew characters you typed after the Hebrew to go to the right of the Hebrew. It doesn't know how to distinguish a single question mark from a word or paragraph in English. So it goes on the right.

If you put in a space and more Hebrew text, it *might* be able to guess that you were still in "Hebrew mode" and put the question mark on the correct side. But punctuation at either end of Hebrew text will often turn up at the wrong end. You can correct it by putting the question mark in first. Then it will consider it "left-to-right text that comes before Hebrew" and put it on the left of the Hebrew...

Answer 2

Shalom! It does not know that Hebrew is to be read from right to left!

Answer 3

Maybe it's just trying to prepare you, Shalom.

Answer 4

You read Hebrew from right to left...