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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 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.
An upside-down interrobang (combining ¿ and ¡, Unicode character: ⸘), suitable for starting phrases in Spanish, Galician and Asturian—which use inverted question and exclamation marks—is called an "inverted interrobang" or a gnaborretni (interrobang spelled backwards), but the latter is rarely used. [17]
Exclamation mark: Inverted exclamation mark, Interrobang: ª: Feminine ordinal indicator: Masculine ordinal indicator, Degree sign (many) Fleuron: Dinkus, Dingbat Floral heart: Dingbat, Dinkus, Hedera, Index: Fleuron. Full stop: Interpunct, Period: Decimal separator: ♀ ♂ ⚥ Gender symbol: LGBT symbols ` Grave (symbol) Quotation mark# ...
Graphically, the exclamation mark is represented by variations on the theme of a period with a vertical line above. One theory of its origin posits derivation from a Latin exclamation of joy, namely io, analogous to "hooray"; copyists wrote the Latin word io at the end of a sentence, to indicate expression of joy.
In 1668, John Wilkins, in An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, proposed using an inverted exclamation mark to punctuate rhetorical questions. [ 4 ] In an article dated 11 October 1841, Marcellin Jobard , a Belgian newspaper publisher, introduced an "irony mark" ( French : point d'ironie ) in the shape of an oversized ...
INVERTED EXCLAMATION MARK U+00A1: Po, other Common § SECTION SIGN U+00A7: Po, other Common ¶ PILCROW SIGN U+00B6: Po, other Common · MIDDLE DOT U+00B7: Po, other Common ¿ INVERTED QUESTION MARK U+00BF: Po, other Common ; GREEK QUESTION MARK U+037E: Po, other Common · GREEK ANO TELEIA U+0387: Po, other Common ، ARABIC COMMA U+060C: Po ...
Spanish and Asturian (both of them Romance languages used in Spain) use an inverted question mark ¿ at the beginning of a question and the normal question mark at the end, as well as an inverted exclamation mark ¡ at the beginning of an exclamation and the normal exclamation mark at the end. [22]
In this table, parentheses mark letters that stand in for themselves or for another. For instance, a rotated 'b' would be a 'q', and indeed some physical typefaces didn't bother with distinct sorts for lowercase b vs. q, d vs. p, or n vs. u; while a rotated 's' or 'z' would be itself.