? came from where?

Question

Question mark (?) came from a language or has any other source?

Answer 1

Punctuation marks are meant for the eye. While the question mark may have been around since the eighth century, it didn't become perfected as we know it until printing evolved.

Some sources say the interrogation or question mark is a corruption of the first and last letters of the Latin word, Quaestio, question, placed one above the other.

Answer 2

Just like other punctuations came into existence, the question mark too came along. No one can really pinpoint its origin, since languages have always borrowed ideas from each other and evolved. Most languages placed the verb in the first place of a sentence to interrogate and did away with the question mark. The affirmative sentences had the verb in the second place. Even today one can write the languages without question mark if need be.

Answer 3

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 (¿) – exclamations are similarly treated – and ending it with a regular one. The Real Academia Española adopted the change in 1754.

Answer 4

french language

Answer 5

I believe it has a French origin and know as a French spacing.
Hope it helps =)

Answer 6

? came from mind.