punctus percontativus

== English == === Etymology === Latin: punctus (“point”) + percontativus (“percontative”) = “percontative point” === Noun === punctus percontativus A reversed question mark (⸮), visually almost identical to the Arabic question mark (؟ (?)), used to mark the end of a percontative statement. 1995, Julia Briggs, “‘The Lady Vanishes’: Problems of Authorship and Editing in the Middleton Canon” in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society II: 1992–1996 (1998), ed. William Speed Hill, page 115: These include Middleton’s […] idiosyncratic placing of apostrophes and deployment of punctuation marks — exclamation marks, question marks and a form of reversed question mark which Malcolm Parkes classifies as “punctus percontativus,” associated […] with rhetorical questions. For more quotations using this term, see Citations:punctus percontativus. ==== Usage notes ==== Possible calques of punctus percontativus include percontation mark and percontation point; both are attested in isolated uses (2005, 2010), but neither has gained any currency. ==== Related terms ====