Once again Dr. K has called attention to exciting linguistic news, in this case, for the history of writing. Apparently scholars of Syriac - a Middle Eastern language known to many as a primary language of the Bible - have been perplexed by the dots that riddle the pages of surviving texts. Dr. Chip Coakley, a Cambridge manuscript expert, has just recently suggested that one grouping of dots, the double dot, is the earliest example of a question mark. Check out the following
link to see the full article. What seems especially intriguing to me is that this double dot resembles our colon, which of course is designed to offer the opposite function of the question mark. Rather than opening up the sentence for many possibilities, the colon limits them, specifying the material that precedes it. Also, I think we could learn something from the way the double dot operates. Apparently it appears at the beginning, rather than the end, of the sentence to indicate to the reader that the subsequent sentence is a question. I know that other languages do this, notably Spanish, but why have we insisted on leaving the question mark until the end? In some cases it would be very helpful - haven't you ever begun reading a sentence aloud, only to realize that it's a question, not a declaration, and your inflection is all wrong? :Maybe we can start this new rule
