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From my experience, many languages with absolutely different alphabets colloquially use the same common punctuation marks, such as:

  • the question mark (?), for inquiring/interrogatives
  • exclamation mark (!), for excitement or emphasis
  • period (.), for declaration

For example, asking a question in a couple different languages:

  • What's your name?
  • Как тебя зовут?
  • ما اسمك؟
  • 您貴姓大名？

Or exclaiming something:

  • Cheers!
  • За здоровье!
  • Στην υγειά σου!
  • 乾杯!

How have these stayed in common usage throughout the evolution of languages and their alphabets? Were they standardized at some point?

hippietrail
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galois
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2 Answers2

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They were standardized at some point, in the 19th-20th centuries, but many languages still keep their own ancient punctuation, e.g. the Armenian period is :, the Armenian question mark is ՞ which is put above the last vowel letter of the question word, the Greek question mark is ;, Spanish uses the upside-down question mark ¿ at the beginning of interrogative sentences (¿Qué? 'What?'), the same with the exclamation mark (¡Hola! 'Hi!'). Japanese has specific punctuation, the period is 。. Amharic keeps the ancient Ge'ez punctuation, but it gets outdated now and often substituted with the European-style one. Many Asian scripts of Indian origin, e.g. Javanese, still keep their traditional punctuation.

Yellow Sky
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    Do you have any references about how this standardization took place or what may have driven it? – acattle Jan 03 '15 at 02:45
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    @acattle - For every languages it happened at a different time, that's a matter of history of every specific language. Have a look at this: http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/the-history-of-punctuation.html and http://grammar.about.com/od/punctuationandmechanics/a/PunctuationHistory.htm and http://msmcclure.com/?page_id=6448 – Yellow Sky Jan 03 '15 at 03:23
  • That comment is more or less what I was looking for. Thanks – galois Jan 03 '15 at 07:58
  • @zixuan Please make a greater effort to write grammatically. People have been flagging your comments for the last couple of days because they have no idea what you're trying to communicate. – prash Jan 11 '18 at 06:55
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In Arabic and Chinese the use of Western-style punctuation is very modern, not before the 20th century.

fdb
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