¿Question Mark? ¡Exclamation Point!
"The Spanish Academy, however, in 1754 ratified the rather marvellous and flamboyant idea of complementing terminal question marks and exaclamation marks with upside-down versions at the beginnings, thus:
¡Lord, love a duck!
¿Doesn't Spanish look different from everything else now we've done this?" (Truss 142-143)
You had to know that I was going to choose this quote. :-) I personally think that this way of punctuating is quite useful. Think about it. When someone is speaking, we place the quotation marks at the beginning and end of the sentence so that the reader knows where the dialogue begins and ends. That is basically the same function of the inverted question mark and exclamation point. Here's an example of where the inverted question mark might be useful in English:
The movie starts at 8:00 pm, right?
The first part is a full sentence "The movie starts at 8:00 pm" and the second part is the actual question "right?". But wouldn't it be easier if you knew where the actual question started?
The movie starts at 8:00 pm, ¿right?
This will probably never catch on in the English language, but I find it quite useful in Spanish. :-)
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