From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Oct 19 2005 - 15:17:30 CST
I also admit that the interrobang looks like an abbreviation for denoting
several missing words (or a completely missing sentence), so it's true it
can't be considered purely as a grammatical puntuation. Most uses of the
character I saw were in isolated forms (for example in comics bubbles), but
it can't be used to correctly represent the oral language.
This character should better be a ideographic symbol, that effectively
escapes the normal grammatical rules when it is used in a sentence (so no
need of an inverted form for Spanish, as it is not grammatically correct in
Spanish either).
From: "Marion Gunn" <mgunn@egt.ie>
>I have to agree with what John says below.
> mg
>
> Scríobh John Hudson:
>> ...
>> 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.
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