From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Mon Sep 05 2005 - 20:40:50 CDT
Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
>> By and large, Israeli punctuation matches that of the rest of the
>> world. One difference from American grammar is the frequent occurence
>> of the sequence `?!' to indicate some level of amazed incredulity.
>> Just for fun, I have included in my Hebrew fonts the `interrobang'
>> symbol ‽, which you can get by typing either !? or ?!. Perhaps this
>> symbol will now sweep the world of Hebrew typesetting by storm‽
> It does seem to be true that Israeli typesetting uses ?! more frequently
> than proper English typesetting does. So I guess it's not necessarily
> so "ungrammatical" to everyone.
Sure it is. Using the interrobang or the sequence ?! to 'indicate some level of amazed
incredulity' is what might be termed expressive typography. It is on par with emoticons
like ;-) What distinguishes punctuation marks proper from such expressive signs is their
connection to grammar, i.e. to the linguistic structures of a language.
I have no major objection to the existence and use of the interrobang in this expressive
way, and more than I object to Japanese schoolgirls dotting their i's with hearts. What
I'm objecting to is the claim that it is a 'punctuation mark', which implies a grammatical
function. Insofar as the interrobang confuses the two distinct grammatical constructions
normally distinguished by the question and exclamation marks, one could call it an
anti-punctuation mark; it actually diminishes the grammatical information available to the
reader.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
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